Pixel to Pot: The Material Politics of Frances Goodman’s PING!

Curated by Dr. Roelof Petrus van Wyk

Frances Goodman’s new show, PING!, reinterprets the grammar of emojis, their simplification and flattening of human emotion into the neutrality of computer code, into a rich conceptual grammar for a surprising series of new textured and fragile clay-based artworks.

Communication in the digital domain demands instant compression and conformity to the principles of efficiency. To be noticed or responded to within the hour, we use the most minor digital units on our devices—pixels, pulses, zeros, and ones. In the small, pixelated rectangle of a text message box, we reduce our feelings to minimal, thumb-typed shorthand, signing off with a smile- a colon and a closing bracket, setting a friendly tone to ensure it's read with the right intent or, in millennial parlance, 'vibe'. The emoticon—created at the intersection of typewriter logic and computer code serves as a prosthesis for our extended emotional lives in the age of the mobile screen, where the aestheticisation of emotion has been cajoled into digital commodification of care. In the digital economy, emotion is data: measurable, transferable, monetised. The analogue body has been replaced in digital absentia; the emoji pictogram now offers a simulacra of our human senses and sensibilities. Are you (☺️🙂😊😀😁) now?

Virtual becomes visceral; through the fire of the kiln, she inscribes large clay vessels, heavy, laborious hollow bodies, with the fragility of our contemporary conditions. While emoji syntax creates the illusion of closeness with simple, instant, single-press characters, Goodman’s new work reveals the emotional layers behind the surface of our screened lives. Her creative process absorbs the instant emotional reflections of scrolling through a fingerprinted screen. She takes them for a spin through deep-earth time, slowly by hand, haptic, and non-compliant; she forms clay coils between her fingers, slowly rolling and stacking them into the voluminous shapes of the pots now on display. Clay resists being easily flattened-it absorbs fingerprints, the Eggplant pot bulges, cracks, and explodes angrily in the kiln. The kiln kept her in suspense until the final moment, delaying the eggplant's successful transformation from soft clay to hard pot. For now.

She burns binary basics into the earth, making ephemeral emotions tactile—brittle and fragile—and human, again. Be careful not to crack the tender stems of a pair of gorgeously wet, red ceramic cherries, as they invite you to caress their juicy skin with extreme care. It records and remembers the syntax of touch, even if you should refrain from letting your hand glide up the curve of a pair of Cherry sculptures with big-B energy. These pots slow down the fickleness of digital seduction, making us want to touch and feel, get hurt, cry, smile, and feel again.

All language bears a politics. Goodman laments the takeover of our emotional expression by machine intelligence in a techno-military-patriarchal society, causing us also to lose critical thinking capabilities as we prompt, copy, paste, and send. Women are frequently expected to show endless emotional depth and range within the social rules of beauty, decorum, self-control and labour. The laborious, feminine materiality of Goodman's past work, from small textual embroideries to a large scale wedding-dress installation, painting intimate photographic scenes in glittering sequins, and even building serpentine acrylic nail sculptures, has amply demonstrated how her artistic practice reflects on the hidden, frequently violent expectations behind a constant 'don't worry, be happy' laissez-faire emotional front that obscure our, and certainly women's, existential weariness.

Finally, the politics of affect, as theorised by scholars such as Sara Ahmed, reminds us that emotions are not private but public acts of orientation that sustain or, god forbid, resist power. To refuse emojis' ephemerality, their fleeting effect on our feelings—by forever casting them into a spell of permanence, caught in the shape or surface of a ceramic pot —can also be a minor act of dissent.