Porcelain and glaze

“… Without leaving your room you may sit to your heart’s content among streams and valleys…”

Guo Xi (ca. 1000 – ca. 1090)

Julie & Jesse’s Without Leaving Your Room manifests research into the representation of landscape in Chinese art and the role it played in the development of Chinese decorative arts and the crafting of objects for the scholar’s studio.

The duo explores the ability of these artefacts to trigger the imagination, allowing viewers to be transformed to the scale of the microcosm, roaming hills and valleys.

The work combines a vocabulary of archetypal Chinese vase forms cast from industrial moulds with a glazing process the duo devised that places value on an additive dimensional layer rather than the negative space or surface of the form. The resulting pieces challenge the vases’ intrinsic decorative and practical purpose to infuse them with a cognitive function.

Forging relationships between the semantics of Chinese landscape representation in history and their experimental methodology, Julie & Jesse have created in the process an ambiguous interplay between tradition and the unrecognised. They transgress the classical representation of landscape scenery painted on the surfaces of vessels exploring ways to make it dimensional and engage with the idea of glaze as a landscape of its own.