(upbeat music)
- [Heidi] Sometimes I feel like it's the clay
telling me what to do.
And I just submit to this very cruel mistress.
(suspenseful music)
It really feels like I am the medium.
Something passes through me or my hands directed by the clay.
Instead of me sculpting it,
it's like it's sculpting me back.
(Heidi laughing)
It's like a conduit for spirits.
My name is Heidi Lau and I'm a sculptor
and I work primarily in clay.
(birds chirping)
Working in clay, literally the most gentle touch
you put on it becomes embedded into the material.
It's just continuous making layers upon layers.
Everything I've learned I just taught myself. I think the only technique
that I use is just scoring the clay, putting slip on it
and then attaching the work.
The hands are probably one of the
(Heidi laughs)
longest running elements
in my work.
I will never cast a real hand
you know, they kind of all like
ghostly and they're elongated,
to signify that it doesn't come from this world.
Yeah, so this is a preliminary sketch
for my project at the catacomb
and so this is the arch.
The piece would hang from the skylight down to the floor.
(soft music)
There's a lot of urns with drapery on top.
It's kind of a symbol for mourning
and I've been wanting to capture that.
(calm music)
I grew up in Macau,
my childhood oscillates between
very strict Chinese parenting
and also me escaping my household and having adventures
in lot of ruins while it was still a colony of Portugal.
The Portuguese has built a lot of cathedrals
and there are a lot of colonial style houses.
I would spend a lot of time wandering into the structures.
I'm trying to capture that essence
of structures you could get lost into.
(soft music)
(bell ringing)
(car hoots)
- Hi
- [Heidi] Wing on Wo is a ceramic store
in Chinatown and it's actually one
of the oldest running business in all Manhattan.
I became friends with the owner Mei, five years ago.
As soon as I stepped into the store,
it just felt so familiar to me
'cause I had grew up in a very similar environment.
I see Chinese diaspora quite similar
to the way I see how Mei runs her store.
Rethinking how ceramics could be interpreted,
or reintroduced to contemporary times.
If I could close my eyes,
I could even see like the books my grandpa had on the shelf
like his garden.
While it's looking in the past,
it's also kind of like, gives me a lot of like energy
to create work both for now and the future.
And that's why I want to bring you this to like
'cause I want the actual elements to kind of reference.
(calm music)
I started thinking about using clay
to make a burial garment after my mom passed away.
As a way to grieve,
I began to look at a lot of burial objects
from Han and Qin dynasty
and also watching a lot of Chinese zombie movies.
(Heidi laughs)
(suspenseful music)
It feels right to grieve with my hands
doing this very labor intensive, almost the most
impractical thing you can think of to do with clay.
The labor of it equals grieving.
(calm music)
(birds chirping)
I started taking very long walks during the residency
and that's kind of how the project
at the catacomb started taking shape slowly
through this aimless, meditative walks.
It's a daily exercise for myself to empty
out my own ego when I am able to get to that state
at the time that I could access this ancestral plane
and find my way on the other side.
(calm music)
(chains clink)
- Got it.
(coins clink)
- I see my work kind of as,
touch points between very opposing ideas
between human and spiritual unknown.
(calm upbeat music)
I feel like at the core
of me making work about grief is putting emotion
into clay and really listening to it.
It becomes something familiar, something beautiful.
(calm upbeat music)