In Between: A process

I wanted to show a part of the the process that went into creating my "In Between" piece and what I was thinking when I was creating this piece.
"In Between" started out as a drawing I did in my sketchbook when I was studying abroad in Australia.
I really liked this drawing, it was expressing some of my homesickness and this feeling of always being pushed forward without ever being able to look back. A lot happened to me and my family between 11th grade in high school and my sophomore year in college and I felt like I never had a chance just to stay still, to hold onto something, to stay secure.



I took this idea of never being able to go back and carried it out in creating this piece, "In Between."
I like the idea of a brick wall, something solid that you can't go through. Also bricks fascinate me and I like to incorporate them in my ceramic pieces. I created this brick wall with an image etched into it. I wanted to express how part of me was still in the past, that I wanted to go back, I didn't want to move forward. However I was forced to move forward, stuck in the present.
The image etched into the wall is me holding one of my baby sisters, staying with my family and turning my back on the rest of the world. This is just a shadowy memory, and I am grounded in reality unable to go back. I felt like I was in between the ever-moving present and my lost past that I had left behind. There was a brick wall separating me and I can never really go back.

This is my final realization of my idea. I wanted to go back to my original idea of wall that stops us from going back, This inevitably of constantly moving forward, never being able to hold onto something. This I based completely on my original concept drawing and was able to effectively create these sad figures in clay. This is actually going to be bookends but the other end has not been fired yet.
Hopefully you enjoyed my idea and my attempt to shell it out. I feel that everyone can relate to being forced forward and never being able to look back or much less go back.