Synergia

Category: Interior

Synergia is a conceptual project that aims to illustrate the phenomena of synergy and emergence using porcelain plates. In systems theory, collections of components (systems) can adopt properties collectively that they cannot have individually. For example, conductivity is an emergent property; it cannot be explained by individual electrons but rather by the interactions between them. Other examples include flocking behaviours in birds, crowd dynamics, and computer programs such as John Conways The Game of Life. I wanted to apply these principles to clay, so I began researching mineralogy and learning about the microscopic components that make up clay – hexagonal platelets just two thousandths of a millimeter wide, that slide over each other to give clay its plasticity – an emergent property. Then I looked to an even smaller, molecular scale, at the sheets of tetrahedral silica and octahedral alumina that layer to form these platelets. Kaolinite, one of the main components of porcelain, is made of an octahedral alumina sheet sandwiched between two tetrahedral silica sheets. Drawing from clay mineralogy, I designed a system of porcelain plates that could be manually rotated to reconfigure a wider pattern, illustrating the phenomena of emergence. Polyhedra are scattered across the plates, camouflaged in the pattern, which is hand painted with engobes and finished with digital enamel transfers of kaolinite SEM scans (reproduced from the 'images of clay' archive of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain & Ireland and The Clay Minerals Society).