Lavate las Manos Antes de Comer
"Lávate las Manos Antes de Comer"
Hand-crocheted cotton, raw clay, kiln-fired
200 × 150 cm, 2026
Every day after school, before sitting down to eat, Georgina's mother said the same thing. Wash your hands before you eat. Said enough times, it stopped being an instruction and became something closer to a ritual.
The work is a hand-crocheted piece from cotton yarn, submerged in raw clay slip sourced from Michoacán, México, and kiln-fired. The cotton burns away completely during firing. The clay keeps the shape of it. What remains is a ceramic record of something that no longer exists. The choice of process is not incidental.
The piece emerges from a research practice concerned with what Georgina calls material custodianship. Materials are collaborators. The role of the maker is that of a custodian: close to what they care for, responsible for it, shaped by it over time. Custodianship does not assume dominion over a material, and it does not assume distance from it either. That research started with guilt. The guilt of making too much, of studios full of failed versions, of not knowing what to do with everything left behind. Clay became central to it because of one quality above everything else: nothing made from it has to stay waste. Failed pieces become slip. Scraps get rehydrated. Baked scraps become grog. The material keeps cycling.
The clay in this work was sourced by hand, pulled from construction excavations, riverbeds, beaches, received as gifts from artisans in Mexico. Processing it is slow. The rocks embedded in raw clay cut the hands during wedging. Cleaning it, breaking it down, dissolving it, filtering it, was where it became obvious that looking after the material and looking after the body doing the work were not really separate concerns. The same attention runs through both.
Care, in this research, is not a value or an aesthetic. It is a practice. For a maker, that means knowing where a material comes from, using all of it, and being honest about what taking from the world actually costs.
The phrase on this banner was there before any of that had a name.
Attention, before you begin.
