This research began with Everyday Objects (2014–2015), a series of high-fired stoneware sculptures, and continued through drawing in Hybrid Objects (2016). Both series explore everyday objects as extensions of memory, identity, and the experience of migration.
When we migrate, we leave behind places, relationships, and objects that are part of our personal histories. In a new environment, we reconstruct a sense of belonging through what we carry with us and what we gradually incorporate into our daily lives. Ordinary objects thus become symbolic fragments of personal memory and cultural identity.
Through ceramics, I reproduce and transform these objects as archaeological remnants of an imagined culture, as artefacts from a fictional museum that tell stories of habits, memories, and ways of life. The use of cobalt blue, historically associated with Chinese porcelain and later adopted and reinterpreted in Europe, introduces another dimension of cultural displacement: techniques and forms also migrate, transform, and acquire new meanings across territories.
In Hybrid Objects (2016), I transpose these objects into drawing, reconstructing them through unexpected combinations, wordplay, and linguistic misunderstandings. The challenges of learning and inhabiting a new language become part of the creative process. Objects lose their original function and evolve into hybrid forms, suspended between different places, times, and meanings.
Between ceramics and drawing, object and language, past and present, these works reflect my own experience of migration and my search for a sense of home through art and the ordinary things that accompany our lives.
Diana Valarezo
2017
