Jayke Severn

Belmont High School, VCE Art Creative Practice

Inadequacy 2024
ceramic

Artist statement:

Inadequacy explores my personal journey with imperfection and the pursuit of unattainable perfection. This precariously stacked tower symbolises my insecurities, its instability reflecting the futility of striving for flawless achievement. Positioned on a low plinth, the stack rises in height yet never reaches an idealised form.

Inspired by the Twelve Apostles, Inadequacy shifts from deep blues reminiscent of the sea into more natural green tones and eventually into a warm earthy beige tone with speckled browns to showcase the tower’s rise from the fluid and ever-changing sea to a solid formation that works with the tower’s organic texture to celebrate growth, resilience, and the beauty in imperfection.

By juxtaposing the grounded realism of this work with the ideal of perfection, I aim to convey the tension between human effort and the impossibility of perfection and to explore the concept of perfection as a negative when it becomes something we hold ourselves up to, especially young people who are bombarded with social media platforms that tell them how to look and act.