Who Speaks When Form Persists? Authorship, Authority and Authenticity in Artistic Practice

Certain forms remain recognisable despite changes in material, technique, and cultural meaning. This paper examines how such continuity is sustained in artistic practice, extending the question posed at the ADPRex × APARN symposium in Singapore: who speaks when form persists? Drawing on my work in Jingdezhen, it considers how material behaviour, specialised knowledge, and accumulated experience influence artistic decisions. Building on earlier research into Operational Memory of Form, the discussion examines three examples: the transformation of painted glazes during high-temperature firing, subsequent pictorial interventions on porcelain inspired by Dunhuang, and the translation of a sculptural study into a monumental work. These cases reveal different relationships between what the artist anticipates, what materials make possible, and what is retained or reconsidered as the work develops. Posthumanist approaches to material agency inform a distinction between contributions to artistic production and the attribution of authorship, while Buddhist non-attachment and Daoist accounts of skilled action offer perspectives on expectation, judgement, and responsiveness. I argue that formal persistence depends neither on reproducing an initial design nor on relinquishing artistic intention, but on the capacity to develop continuity through transformation.

Keywords persistence of form; material agency; artistic authorship; porcelain painting; Buddhist non-attachment; Jingdezhen

Olga Cuxart Oriol is an artist-researcher working across painting, sculpture, large-scale installation, and ceramics. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, China. Based between Jingdezhen and Barcelona, her research examines material agency, distributed authorship, and the persistence of form through sustained studio-based inquiry. Integrating industrial and artisanal processes, her work explores how embodied knowledge and material interaction generate artistic meaning, contributing to contemporary debates in artistic research.