27/05/2026
Paige Tilloston
Ceramics in Expanding Practice Graduate 2026
pretty; beautiful
My work examines contemporary beauty as a system that produces and sustains a shared sense of inadequacy. Rather than an attainable ideal, beauty is understood as something continually pursued yet never secured, requiring ongoing adjustment, concealment, and self-correction.
Using the vase, an object historically tied to decoration, containment, and femininity, I explore how adornment functions simultaneously as aspiration and constraint. Decorative gestures become sites of tension, where softness gives way to pressure, and ornament becomes a mechanism of discipline.
The work centres the collective experience of not fully inhabiting prescribed femininity. It considers how the act of trying to fit, through embellishment, refinement, or modification, often intensifies misalignment rather than resolving it. In this way, beauty operates less as a goal than as a structure that depends on continual failure.
Through a visual language of excess, the work traces the point at which enhancement collapses into distortion. Attraction and repulsion coexist, revealing the instability of ideals that demand transformation while resisting fulfilment.
The materiality of clay reinforces this tension, as its capacity to hold memory, record pressure, and permanently register alteration mirrors the cumulative, irreversible effects of continual self-modification.
