From the tide of the hands

Through a poetic phenomenology, Dombrowsky queries rêverie as an oneiric, creative force that intimately negotiates the material entanglements of my practice. Dombrowsky considers ceramic artefacts and materials of practice as collaborators seek to open up ontological boundaries around what might constitute a hand *a point attached to a human/nonhuman body which holds, senses, directs, seizes, protects, and possesses.

In the process of sculpting, Dombrowsky listens to the materials, and in the tactile union between material and maker, they take form. Dombrowsky carries these artefacts, dispersing them as gifts when a moment of affection occurs. The result is a sprawling archaeology, not for the archive but for dispersal and erosion.

Affection propels the flow and fabrication of this research. Dombrowsky conceptualises affection as an emotive relation between things which summons a feeling leading to action: as in affect. It occurs in the softened spaces of daily encounters, conversations, and daydreams that ooze between textual and sculptural material research.*Cradled by the hand of a dear friend, held up to the sky by the Prunus Campanulata in my mother’s garden, slipped into the pocket of an unknown’s jacket, sealed by a skin of crystallised salt in my studio.

When held as prosaic charms indexing affection, memory and feeling, the artefacts take on an aura which sets in motion an entangled web of relations within the everyday. Dombrowsky defines aura as an energetic force whereby the artefacts possess a liveliness and are able to hold their own affectionate gaze. Through this understanding of aura, the artefacts assert a kind of autonomy, as in the power to affect the receiver.

By holding and being held by the artefacts, a feeling is felt; an oneiric image is summoned. By dispersing artefacts of practice as gifts, Dombrowsky nurtures relationships beyond linguistic rapports, generating a reciprocal cycle of feeling. Furthermore, these everyday dispersals seek an alternative system of value to one of commodification and monetary exchange.

Through a poetic phenomenology, Dombrowsky queries rêverie as an oneiric, creative force that intimately negotiates the material entanglements of practice. Dombrowsky considers ceramic artefacts and materials of practice as collaborators as they seek to open up ontological boundaries aroun what might constitute a hand *a point attached to a human/nonhuman body which holds, senses, directs, seizes, protects, and possesses.

In the process of sculpting, Dombrowsky listens to the materials, and in the tactile union between material and maker, they take form. Dombrowsky carries these artefacts through days, dispersing them as gifts when a moment of affection occurs. The result is a sprawling archaeology, not for the archive but for dispersal and erosion.