About the Work

Context and Development

STRANGE FRUIT emerged as a response to the almost alchemical process of developing and executing glazes and glazing. It formed an evocative assemblage intertwining past and present, exploring complex emotional landscapes through an intuitive constellation of images. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s method of constructing meaning through juxtaposition and visual fragments, the work engages psychoanalytic territory: a descent into emotional depth as a necessary movement toward self-articulation and consciousness.

The motif of the pomegranate, informed by the Persephone mythos, appears as a symbolic charge of duality - darkness and knowledge, containment and revelation - marking a threshold between states of being. In its earlier iterations, the fruit existed within a rigid spatial system: a formal grid that underscored a tension between order and affect, between emotional intensity and structural containment.

Visually, STRANGE FRUIT presented a grid-like formation with concentric, radiating lines, against which organic shapes appeared almost suspended. Earthy tonalities and deep chromatic density created friction with white highlights and scorched surfaces, reinforcing a dialectic of light and shadow, visibility and concealment.

ET HIC - Structural Evolution

ET HIC (And Here / And in This Place), while conceptually rooted in this lineage, marks a significant evolution in form and process. The work is physically smaller (40 × 51.5 cm) yet carries a profound structural transformation. Over a period of four to five years, the rigid grid has been gradually destabilised and reconfigured into a more organic, deformed infrastructure. The fruits no longer hover as displaced entities; instead, they are integrated into the system itself, emerging from its lines and joints as an intrinsic component of the structure.

The work emerges through an insistence on material intelligence and sustained attention, where an organic and deliberately deformed grid is allowed to develop over time through processes of tension, modulation and care. The pomegranates are not placed upon the structure but arise from its intersections, thickening along its lines as if the system itself were generating matter. This is not a displacement of agency, but a durational act of authorship - one grounded in depth, perseverance and intuitive precision. Form is negotiated through resistance and responsiveness, allowing the surface to oscillate between control and growth, articulation and rupture, system and body.

In this sense, ET HIC articulates a self-sustained infrastructure: a spatial and psychological field where structure and organism are no longer oppositional but co-emergent. The work holds an unresolved tension between containment and expansion, precision and deformation, suggesting a living system that both supports and disturbs its own order.

© Camilla Howalt