Fruit Bowl
Manufactured by Nick Weddell
Produced in exclusive for Side Gallery
New York City, 2022
Stoneware and glaze

Measurements
35 cm x 40 cm x 35h cm
13,8 in x 15,7 in x 13,8h in

Edition
Unique piece

Concept
Nicholas Weddell wakes up one morning from uneasy dreams to find his vessels transformed into enormous vermin. He must be radioactive, he thinks, for evolution to progress around him at such an alarming rate. Cups transform into pitcher plants, pitchers grow eyes, pots sprout teeth. Chairs covered in an amorphous ooze threaten to dissolve the sitter, the table that might have you as a meal. Every assumption must be questioned. What does it mean ‘to drink’ if we have two mouths and four tongues, if the cup bites you when you present your lip? As Nicholas Weddell wakes after a night of fitful, uneasy dreams, he knows his new profession is a cryptozoologist of clay. He doffs his tan pith helmet, hikes up his dungarees, laces his boots, eager to catalog the mutations of his own work--the specialization, the new species, the food webs. He pins each of the new organisms to a wax board, but they all wiggle free, refusing to be cataloged. They resume their predatory trickery, their camouflage, their mimicry, but Nicholas Weddell stuffs them in a sack until they grow stiff as ceramics. Biology. Gone. Wild. Animism on overdrive. Primordial clay clothes itself with symphonies of silica, molten, merging with copper carbonate. A feast of green glory. Sour lemon of vanadium with a bowtie of raspberry cobalt blue. A color that can only be called “demon leather”. Nicholas Weddell wakes from a night of restless, fitful dreams to plot his next journey into the unknown. The world into which he wakes is out of control, true, but also wondrous and joyful and new.