Eliza Au
ENG
Squaring the Circle, 2025
Ceramic, metal and plastic hardware, slip casting, mold making, multiple firing, 1222℃, 304.8 × 400 × 213.36cm.
《Squaring the Circle》 is an installation made up of hundreds of ceramic fragments. Eliza Au began with the architecture and ornamentation of spaces carrying religious meaning, such as cathedrals, temples, and mosques. Rather than pointing to any specific religion, she focuses on the symmetry, radial patterns, and grid-like structures found in common across sacred spaces from different cultures. Through these recurring patterns—also seen in Tibetan mandalas and Islamic tile decoration—she calls to mind how humanity has long understood the concepts of sacredness and transcendence through architecture and pattern.
The structure of the work was also influenced by cave-like spaces used for religious practice and meditation, such as China's Dunhuang Grottoes. Just as the walls of the Dunhuang Grottoes are filled with countless images of the Buddha, the repetition of form plays an important role in this work as well. Repetition here is not mere decoration; it becomes a device that focuses the viewer's gaze and leads them into a meditative state. Each ceramic fragment incorporates the shapes of a square and a circle, where the square symbolizes the earth and the circle symbolizes the sky.
