The original project title, “That feeling when you finally decide you want to have children one day, and the next day you read that climate scientists are warning we only have 12 years before the s*** hits the fan #2”, evokes internet speak, divulging the implicit nature of the internet as not only a place to disseminate information concerning environmental annihilation, but as a community where we awaken our awareness of our personal contribution and reaction to the fallout of our role in the destruction of our planet’s ecosystems.

12 years is also the length of childhood, and this challenges the artist to consider the personal uncertainty of climate change as an intimate politic. The mention of such a private thought as “having children one day” in the title, is not just a title – it’s a life. This uncertainty adds another layer of responsibility for women in an age where we are told that we must have it all – a career, a partner, a family – along with our own space in the world. We must now consider bringing a new life into a world that is dying; this has become another act to consider in our maternal natures.

Making a vessel from clay is a process of making a form out of the formless, it is of the earth and from the earth. Vessels have throughout time been made to hold something. Water. Food. Gifts to the afterlife. Vessels are also boats, fams, veins, arteries and wombs. Vessels hold, but they also collapse, give way and break. They become shards, floods, aneurysms, shipwrecks and children. Earth is a vessel too. The organic fluidity of these ceramic structures, their flow of form openly addresses the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene – of earth as a vessel that is slowly, then quickly losing its ability to hold.

Zhu Ohmu’s white, corrugated, bulging vessels approach themselves in a state of collapse – lapsing over and moving in and out of a space where a personal and collective world consciousness is inhabited. This is a personal appreciation of loss, but more specifically it is of a sense of losing. The softness of knocking what is slipping away.