Welded painted steel, 8.5 x 23 x 8, 2019.
A slipstream is the current of water dragged along behind a moving hull, and a follower who enters it is drawn along with less effort than the leader. The title names the sculpture’s relation to the ceramics of Ruth-Anne French, whose arrangements of square tubes and vessels it follows in steel, and the word carries its own clay: slip is the liquid clay a ceramicist casts and joins with.
The work holds two registers of scale at once: the intimate and the architectural. The bowl and its long, curved handle read as a utensil, and the stacked tubes and curved rail beneath it read as beams and track, so a spoon lies on a structure the way a hand’s tool rests on a building’s frame. The low, long line leans into motion. The bowl is the prow, and the coil at the opposite end is the eddy that trails behind it.
