Pathompon Tesprateep
strange fruit: clay sculpture ii, 2023
Archival pigment ink print on ILFORD galerie metallic gloss 260 gsm, mount on gator board with archival tape and silver shadow gab aluminium frame
30 x 30 cm
Accompanied by a signed certificate of authenticity by the artist
strange fruit: clay sculpture (2023) by Pathompon Tesprateep starting with the idea to visualise a movie prop, that would appear in one scene of Pathompon’s first feature film project that he is developing. ‘Tremble Like A Flower’ is a film in which some parts touch a thin line between what was and what never existed, borrowing history from other times and spaces to be used in a playful manner. In this scene, a group of characters stumble upon fruit on a tree which they have never seen before and it tempted them to pick and taste it. In the script dialogue, they talk about textures and flavour details after biting, chewing and swallowing and it was different from anything they had ever tasted. The characters can not associate this fruit with any reference fruits based from their past experiences. To be able to design the fruit that has never existed in the real world or something that has not yet been discovered by humans, Pathompon chose to reject the imagining of this object himself. The script dialogue was fed to be visualised through random computation, based on data gathered and processed by a massive database of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
However, the series of images of strange fruit: clay sculpture (2023) is a sketch of a small sculpture made from clay to finished pottery works (an ancient wisdom) through the will of emulating the desire to preserve and reject the decay of fruit overtime. It is a transition from designing edible movie props to cultural artifacts. This series of works not only generates an artifact, it also imitates the eye when looking at objects, both as a photographer and as an anthropological conservator. This work does not deliberately rely on AI in the direction of scientific accuracy, it’s rather exploring the shape of public virtual memories through images and language floating in the air, which will be used to borrow, exchange, share, look back and forth, endlessly accumulating change through time.