Fred Levine is delighted to share Sedimentary Selves, aa large installation on show at the British Ceramics Biennial by Chilean artist, Fernando Casasempere.
Sedimentary Selves
For 28 years in London, Fernando Casasempere has never discarded a single ceramic fragment. Every broken piece from the kiln, every work destroyed out of dissatisfaction, every accidental shard has been carefully preserved with a clear intention: to avoid contributing to environmental waste while knowing that one day these fragments would find new purpose.
That day has arrived.
Sedimentary Selves consists of ceramic boxes (80x80x20cm) filled with these accumulated fragments from nearly three decades of practice. The pieces lie together without hierarchy—a shard from 1996 next to one from last year, glazes from different periods creating unexpected dialogues, techniques from various stages of the artist's evolution now coexisting in the same space.
This installation operates simultaneously as recycling and archaeology. The fragments gain new life, transforming from "waste" into art, while also creating a stratified record of Casasempere's creative journey. Like geological sediments, different periods of his work have settled into layers, but here they are deliberately mixed, allowing viewers to discover connections across time that reveal hidden patterns in the artist's practice.
Each box becomes a palimpsest—a surface where multiple histories are written over each other, where past and present versions of the artist's creative self converge. The work asks fundamental questions about value, permanence, and the relationship between making and unmaking. What we consider "failure" or "waste" may actually be the most honest record of the creative process.
Beyond its conceptual depth, Sedimentary Selves embodies a practical philosophy of environmental responsibility. In an art world often driven by constant production and consumption, Casasempere's 28-year practice of preservation offers an alternative model—one where nothing is truly discarded, where every act of making contributes to a larger, ongoing work about time, memory, and the persistence of creative energy.
The installation ultimately suggests that we are all sedimentary selves—accumulations of experiences, attempts, failures, and discoveries that layer upon each other to create who we are. In refusing to throw anything away, the artist has created not just an artwork, but a meditation on the value of keeping, the beauty of impermanence, and the archaeology of becoming.
Sedimentary Selves and The British Ceramics Biennial will be on show until 19 October 2025.
