Abstrakt
It promotes skillful, engaging, keen play and a certain understanding that comes through making.
In a society dominated by mass production and quick delivery, there is significance to traditional making methods that continue to provide context and provenance. We have the responsibility to preserve practices of making, for the sake of culture and the sake of us, as a ten-fingered species. Through teaching a skill and offering opportunity for a creative, productive engagement, this project touches on two themes: It highlights the merits of slow, traditional production methods and product ethics while it installs practices of making which are accessible to different ages and abilities. Abstrakt is a set of modular plaster molds for creating slip cast ceramic objects. Assembled from a set of parts, composed from a ‘vocabulary’ of geometric shapes that users can arrange in infinite combinations. The process of creating slip cast objects is much simplified and accelerated. This makes the practice of ceramic work more approachable and simpler to interpret and iterate on.