In Cape Town are minor collections of 17th century Chinese and Japanese porcelain vases. These are mostly remnant inventories that the Dutch East India Company shipped from the Far East to Europe, via the replenishment port Cape of Good Hope. It is the template of the Chinese vase and the Japanese decoration technique of nagashigake (dripping glaze) that I employ as simulacrum and palimpsest.

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My education in literary theory includes Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis. Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing as anamorphic object of desire. The Thing is a remnant of the Real and lacks symbolisation. By looking awry at the Thing, the gaze of desire misrecognises it as symbolic promise. Fantasy, as in the construction of convention, coordinates desire and aesthetic sublimation.

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The content of my imaginary vases represents the Thing as brute geological element prior to the symbolic index of conventional glaze. Content always poses as contingent threat to symbolisation – as in psychosis, volcanic eruption, or ejaculation, it threatens to spill over and dissolve the body that holds it together. By the fantasy of the ceramic convention of nagashigake, the anamorphotic contingent embodies the pleasure of aesthetic desire.