A path is the product of invention and repetition, memory and imagination, a history of collective desire held in the mind and written on the ground.

Lin Xu reinvents historical patterns through the processes of making, deftly guiding mechanical, chemical and sedimentary transformations.

Paul Robles guides his knife with a practiced hand, moved by intuition and tradition, reimagining once-familiar images over focused hours cutting paper.

Minds change, bodies move; the land remembers. A shortcut snakes across the grass one summer. Ancient roadbeds reappear in drought or after rain.

Water cuts its own path through the sand, but to persist and to sustain, the oasis must be cultivated.

The brain sees a face where there isn’t one, so obdurate the neural pathways and
so urgent the desire for something to meet our gaze.

Material has its own sense of direction, orients along its own desired paths.

The memory of clay accounts for both its brittleness and strength. In the kiln, stacked fragments forge alliance, held in place by gravity and glaze.

We see paper’s memory in each indelible, dividing crease. Its toughness, so suited to wrapping and record-keeping, erodes with every fibre cut.

A path divides, but a path can be retraced. Once cut, “this” and “that”, like “there” and “back,” are matters of perspective.

Scraps and shavings blossom into porcelain roses, rejecting “keepsake,” “castoff,” “ornament” and “accident,” among other names.

Grotesque menageries emerge from holes in butcher-paper masks. Black “window flowers” grow from accumulated absences. Screens project as readily as they conceal.

Points on a line describe a path: images and forms strung like beads, familiar in the hand, fruit on a vine to be plucked from the air.

Trace the contours of a bottle gourd, drawing it up from the potter’s wheel. Draw on muscle memory of dumpling folds to form a porcelain pillow.

Probing Rorschach sprays of lacy perforations, zodiac animals, foxes, rams and serpents peer back amidst the blinking eyes of peacock feathers.

Some paths connect. Others are borders.

Forms and colours migrate, resettle and adapt to new configurations, radiate like imitation celadon from scattered Silk Road outposts.

Ideas and images persist, surviving relocation, translation and conversion. A good path can get twisted, a winding path eventually comes to rest.

Paths collide, entangle, wear away, grow over. Durable and fleeting, to serve as guides they must be trod and tended.

Xu’s repetitions and transformations produce dream logic, echoing the unconscious durability and plasticity of the mind and offering assurance that things might fall in place.

We don’t see Robles in the “faces” of his finished masks, nor is he hiding behind them. Instead, identity is ambivalent, a trajectory continually adjusted with every surgical cut.

Steven Leyden Cochrane