Lucille Mona Ling

Prelude to Memory is a multidisciplinary installation that translates a written text into physical, experiential form. It consists of four hand-built ceramic sculptures on wooden plinths, arranged across a moss-covered floor, alongside a fifth plinth holding a unique ceramic book, a hand-stitched edition of the accompanying text.

The four sculptures, Moon Rabbit / Young Hare, Shahmaran / 女娲 Nu Wa / Serpent in Eden, Schwanenjungfrau / Siddhartha and The Swan / Leda, and Ancestral Horse, are named after myths that recur, independently, across both European, Middle Eastern and Asian storytelling traditions. Rather than illustrating the written work, they stand as Protomemories: ancestral, cross-cultural symbols made in clay, one of the oldest materials used to carry human narrative. Finished in a crackle glaze, their surfaces embrace fracture as openness rather than flaw.

At the centre sits a ceramic book: two glazed porcelain covers bound with coptic stitching, holding a printed edition of the text. Positioned on a compass-aligned plinth, its left page facing West, its right facing East, the book gives the writing a literal orientation in space.

The moss underfoot is soft, rootless, and grows on every continent: an invitation to enter (with or without shoes) into a calm, grounding space built to hold difficult, inherited memory. The installation doesn’t ask viewers to read the whole text or match sculpture to passage; instead, word and object sit side by side as equal, non-hierarchical extensions of the same enquiry into memory, migration, and the dissolution of East/West binaries.

The Form

The installation’s central object is a hand-built ceramic book: two porcelain covers, glazed to match the sculptures, Coptic-stitched around a printed edition of Prelude to Memory using an ancient, glue-free binding method. Displayed open on a compass-aligned plinth, its left page pointing West, its right page East, the book collapses the distinction between the written and the sculptural that runs through the whole project, giving the text a material, orientable presence in the room rather than treating it as separate from the objects around it. The wider installation places the book and four sculptures across a moss-covered floor, its softness and rootlessness meant to hold viewers as they sit with the memories the text recounts.

The Text

Prelude to Memory (text) is a bidirectional text that can be read starting from the “West” or the “East.” It explores inherited memory through the retelling of the lives of the author’s mother and father: her childhood in West Germany, where her Turkish heritage was silenced within the family and wider community, and his childhood in China, born just before the Cultural Revolution, where cultural suppression marked an entire nation.

The text is written in the second person, addressing the parents rather than speaking as them, which avoids appropriating their voices while echoing the way memory itself is transmitted, through dialogue. For every memory recounted, the point of origin has to be a real, transmitted memory. Fictionalisation is only allowed at the level of detail, never in the general facts of what happened. No interviews were conducted with family members, since that would disrupt the organic way memory is passed down, and the whole point of the work is to explore that process. Memories are written mostly in the present tense, since trauma is something re-experienced in the present, even long after the original event has passed.

Prelude to Memory (text) is as much a personal family history as a collective one. It touches, implicitly rather than explicitly, on how memory gets institutionalised and controlled. Where the family’s own record falls silent, whether through her grandmother’s choices or through Maoist censorship, the writing turns to critical fabulation and mythorealism to work responsibly within those archival, and historical empty spaces.

The text is also conceived as a literal landscape, shaped by orientation, directionality, and perspective. Its “West” half reads left to right, as is habitual in Western reading. Its “East” half reads right to left, as was traditional in China. As the reader turns the pages, the two halves walk toward each other, converging at the point where the author’s parents meet, an ending that is also the beginning of her own existence: a prelude to her own memory. Structure and content mirror one another. Approaching the text this way, as three-dimensional, as landscape, is what first opened the door to the sculptural practice that runs through the rest of the work.

Vases and Glaze Development

Separate from the Prelude to Memory installation, a parallel body of work has developed through vase-making. It is here that the crackle glaze used across the sculptural practice has been developed and refined, each piece worked by hand rather than industrially reproduced.

The vase as a form carries its own long history, one shaped by the movement of glazes and techniques across cultures and colonial trade routes, and by the object’s later life as a marker of taste under mass production. This history sits behind the work as a point of research and reflection rather than something the vases set out to illustrate. Hand-making each one, with its own small variations in glaze and form, is simply how the practice has chosen to work.

The vessels stand apart from the wider degree show, as their own strand of the ceramic practice, though the glaze they’ve helped shape carries through into the ancestral figures on display.