Included as part of ‘How Do I Refer to You?’ curated by Zane Edwards. 

“The Feeling of Porous Bricks is an attempt to understand fluidity and softness. It also is inevitably, a love letter to clay, one of the greatest teachers of fluidity and softness. Presented in four chapters, the film follows a brick’s transformation from hard to light. I am using a brick as a representative for feeling, the kind of feeling that sits heavy in your stomach, piles up and doesn’t move. The two long sequences of a body being built with clay and the brick being covered and hidden with clay, offer a space for seepage. Viewers are encouraged to imagine themselves as the body/as the brick/as the clay/as the hands in order to loosen the feelings and become malleable. Another long sequence shows hands piercing clay and body, allowing light to pass through, allowing for a way into the bricks/feelings. I tie this to the image of Saint Sebastian, a martyred saint who was pierced by arrows. I also tie it to the image of Louise Bourgeois’, Saint Sebastienne (1992).  Where the arrows hit, lines on the body crumple like weather lines, shifting to let the high and low pressures mingle and change. Clay encourages us to mingle and change, to allow the distinctions between fingertips and surface to disappear, to let borders move and shift and to allow feelings to transform into something else. A material that can be everything at once, hard, soft, pushed, pulled, visible and invisible and so many other binaries and all of it in between. A material that transforms constantly until it transcends. A material that makes up a third of what bricks are made of, that builds the world, and that does it all with grace and with grit. I promise to learn from this material.” - Marianna Ebersoll, 2023