Orphans

The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
W.G. Sebald “The Rings of Saturn”

A summary of a few days in 2012 and 2013 spent chasing the remnants of closed tableware factories, trying to reach them before the bulldozers did.

The orphans are foundlings, they come from broken, crippled plaster moulds left on the sites of abandoned porcelain factories. They were born partly out of curiosity, a desire to see what I would find on the ‘other side’ of a plaster mould hollowed out by water dripping from the ceilings, partly out of an inner need to record and document how Nature decomposes and disintegrates man-made patterns, dreams and structures. So the casts, the ‘specimens’, are trophies of the processes that have been happening since people left the place.

Operacja “Książ”/ Reconciliation, Porcelain Factory “Książ” († 2004) in Walbrzych, Poland