Skip to content
Process

Finding the Fragment

Thinking through what it means to make something partial, something unfinished, and still call it done. On the poetics of the incomplete object.

The fragment is a complete thing. It is not a broken whole — it is a whole thing that happens to be partial. I have been thinking about this a great deal in the studio lately, working with clay that I leave deliberately unfinished: edges unsmoothed, surfaces unpressed, forms stopped before they reach resolution.

There is a difference between something unfinished and something incomplete. Unfinished suggests a failure of time or will. Incomplete suggests a deliberate threshold — a decision to stop here, at exactly this point, and call it done.