METAVASE: Floral Desire
GENRE
Poetics of the Real
EPITAPH
I look at the beautiful flower in the vase and see my gaze returned, but the cut flower does not look back at me from the same place as where I see it.
AESTHETIC CONCEPT
Ecocritical parody of the trope of the potter’s vase in the artifice of floristry, through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
AESTHETIC FORM
Postmodernism | Ecocriticism
AESTHETIC DEVICES
Meta-parody: Ironically reproducing and destabilizing the vase-flower trope.
Metalepsis: Collapsing boundaries between representational layers.
Mise en abyme: Recursive staging of absence within absence.
MEDIUM
Hand-built earthenware ceramic with multiple oxidation kiln firings: decals, gold, and on-glaze.
DESCRIPTION
METAVASE: Floral Desire presents a series of ceramic sculptures that operate as meta-parodic simulations of the classical floral vase. Rather than reproducing the vase as a formal archetype, the works enact a recursive citation of its cultural function: to aestheticize severed nature through floristry. The project foregrounds the vase not as a container of beauty, but as a mnemonic device—an index of ecological rupture and symbolic loss.
Situated within an ecocritical and psychoanalytic framework, the sculptures stage a mise en abyme of desire: the flower, already cut, becomes a signifier of absence, while the vase functions as a placeholder for the object-cause of desire (objet a). The gaze is not returned by the flower, but refracted through the structure of the vase itself, which performs a theatre of longing and deferred retrieval.
By deploying postmodern devices such as meta-parody and metalepsis, the work resists resolution and instead rehearses the impossibility of presence. It is not the flower that is mourned, but the Real it once indexed. In this way, METAVASE transforms the copy into a critical site—where citation becomes critique, and repetition becomes rupture.
ARTIST
Johannes Scott holds a BA in Theory of Literature from UNISA, and his postgraduate work engages Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics. His practice explores ecocriticism and the ethics of representation. As parodist, the artist proceeds by imitating as closely as possible the formal conventions of ceramics in matters of style, design, decal decoration, and glazing.
ARTWORKS
CONTEXTUAL ESSAYS
