As they folded in and breached out (ruffled orifice)
2022
Glazed stoneware
15 x 14 x 13 inches





As they folded in and breached out (turquoise mouth flowering)
2022
Glazed stoneware
20 x 9 x 9 inches




As they folded in and breached out (shelless)
2022
Glazed stoneware
20 x 9 x 9 inches





As they folded in and breached out (Moss)
2022
Glazed stoneware
13 x 9.5 x 10 inches



As they folded in and breached out (three leggy)
2022
Glazed stoneware
12 x 8 x 8 inches





As they folded in and breached out (bursting)
2023
Glaze stoneware
18.5 x 12 x 12 inches



As they folded in and breached out (tentacular)
2022
Glazed stoneware
17 x 10 x 11 inches


As they folded in and breached out (sprout)
2023
Glazed stoneware
11 x 7 x 7 inches


As they folded in and breached out (slough) I
2023
Glazed stoneware
18 x 11 x 10 inches


As they folded in and breached out (slough) II
2023
Glazed stoneware
18 x 11 x 10 inches





pabulite (wet flame)
2022
Glazed stoneware
39 x 28 x 3 inches




pabulite (eye of the sea portals)
2022
Glazed stoneware
39 x 28 x 2.5 inches







pabulite (swirling teeth)
2023
Glazed stoneware
33 x 33 x 6 inches




pabulite (primordial bliss)
2023
Glazed stoneware
31 x 38 x 4 inches




pabulite (drifting root)
2023
Glazed stoneware
41 x 35 x 4 inches

As they folded in and breached out & Pabulite
Glazed stoneware 
2022

This bodies-in-flux perplexed the boundaries across animal, vegetal, fungal, and mineral, indicating an erratic climate and manifold evolutionary path. As they folded in and breached out (2022) resemble fragments of the offshore - barnacles, algae, marine invertebrates, as well as residues of amphibian scales, tendrils, gills, limbs, and the indeterminate. The forms invite further pondering over the relationship between these elusive organisms - whether they are symbiotic, mutualistic, parasitic, cancerous; or merely bizarre conglomerates of objectiveless growth.

Pabulite is a term proposed by a recent Paleontological study to describe the discovery of hybrid fossilized remains of a crustacean, a belemnite, and a vertebrate, caught in the digestive process from the Early Jurassic Posidonia Shale. Comprised of the Latin words pabulum for food and the Greek word lithos for stone, the word inscribes living entanglement in petrified form. Appeared as shedded skins or erode landscapes, these indefinable bodies render the unsettling poetics of deep ecology, while alluding to the mythology of the inhuman that connects unimaginable ancestral traces with radical metamorphism in changing environment. 
© Shuyi Cao 2023