Rae Tribbick

I am a ceramic sculptor and poet. I create mostly figurative work, normally unglazed, sometimes pit-fired and often decorated with hidden text, including Morse code and my own invented language. 

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Ever since I was little, I have been a collector. Rocks, buttons, feathers, even broken pieces of pottery. But try as I might, I cannot collect memories without them. I am neurodivergent, have poor short-term memory and aphantasia, which means that I don’t have a ‘mind’s eye’: everything is foggy and grey.

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I make sculptures and write poems to help me remember. They act as mementoes of stories that made me laugh and the people that I love. My sculptures often remain fragmented, mirroring how I see the world,  rather than a whole. It’s difficult for me to hold the entirety of an experience, so I focus on capturing the individual moments, the parts that stand out or resonate.

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As materials go, I think clay is the closest to the concept of  memory. It’s malleable: you can add and subtract and you can easily change its texture and shape, and yet somehow it is still the same material you started with. It, like us, is made of the earth, and will become the earth again. 

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Clay has been used by humans for thousands of years: When we work with it, we are connected to our past, and it is said that clay itself has a memory. In fact, there is a myth (called Archaeoacoustics) that if ancient pottery could be played like a record, we would be able to hear people from that time speak. It’s a debunked, but beautiful, idea. It makes me wonder if many years from now someone might find a broken piece of my work and it may spark a new memory, just for them.