White biscuit porcelain, coloured slip, and glaze
Unique installation

This special edition of Fragment(s) called The bottle edition is a library of 72 porcelain bottles – all unique yet similar. The seemingly deconstructed shapes chronicle the history, breakage and decay of six distressed ceramic production moulds Julie & Jesse collected at an abandoned bottle production facility in Jingtao Cichang, an old factory area of Jingdezhen, known as the Chinese capital of porcelain. The duo have cast new pieces from these old moulds to reveal the beauty and poetics in their physical deterioration and to celebrate what would otherwise be discarded.

“With each cast we produce, the bottles bear less of a resemblance to their original appearance as the moulds continue to erode and break down. The six shapes transform and evolve into new ones whilst retaining an archetypal half as we carefully and intentionally keep 50% of the mould intact as a tribute to what the forms used to look like. Our making process perpetuates and elaborates the designs the factory was producing – it gives new life to the moulds, turning flaws into a desirable design and the manufacturing of identical pieces into the production of individual ones.”

In each piece Julie & Jesse have also singled out a fragment or two of the broken moulds which have been given a colour that accentuates the parts of the shape that have changed over the course of making the installation. The colours, taken straight from the COS collection, speak to the history of ceramic production Jingdezhen is famous for – blue and white and celadon.