The artist has recently been heard to say, in an unguarded moment, "references are cheating", an outrageous notion in itself, but an indi- cation that new doubts have begun to appear about the whole issue of context and artist neutrality (silence) in the face of her own work. This reappraisal of context can be marked by the unexpected ap- pearance of her 'Reassembly' pieces ( spring 2011). With this series she began to explore the possibility of escaping references altogether by starting with an empty conceptual space and creating an object that was not made from something that already existed and did not refer to anything other than itself. Whereas the 'Corrections' series began with a large charismatic object from nature ( a tree root), she now wanted to start ab nihilo with a conceptually neutral ( neutered) object/form. Her first attempt was intended to be simply a test object on which she could explore a combination of techniques, something all artisans do on a regular basis. However, it is worth noting that she was already mentally referring to this original piece as her 'sampler', which brought to mind childhood images of mending, which in turn meant that, even before removing the piece from the kiln, associations had already begun to occur. In the making of the piece she had become intrigued with the possibility that when things get broken, and then patched and put back together, they are not neces- sarily worse or of lesser value, the idea of making something valu- able out of something broken - the idea of mending. What emerged from the plaster was an almost fully-formed entity. The result of this experiment was, to use a quaint notion, beautiful, improbably beautiful. Whereas the work in the 'Corrections' show was slightly prickly, awkward, humorous and/or alarming, depending on the viewer, she found this ‘test piece’ inexplicably beautiful.
