Echoes of de Chirico: Collaboration between Curtis Stewardson and Sandra Trujillo.

This collaboration began during an artist-in-residence at OBRAS Foundation in Portugal.  Our aim was dinnerware -  “table for two”, but It was clear from the mid-point that our project was destined to become something other than traditional dinnerware. The forms that Curtis made were tangential to service and the imagery I developed was for cartoons.  My job then was to learn to render something stable within the idea of failing architecture.  I think in hindsight, the surrealistic styled images and complex ceramic form revealed something to both of us: that every dynamic shift was a specific aesthetic response and allowed for new directions. Immediacy, serious play, and a surrealist reference played into our hands as artists and collaborators as we worked through 15 forms. The title of this body of work pays a debt to the great Georgio de Chirico for leading the work into the path of impossible paths with looming shadows and dead ends.