Hello, I’m Anne McCrossan. I am a writer and artist working primarily in ceramics. I live in St Ives in Cornwall UK.
I think of the age we’re living in today as the early days of digital civilisation. It’s a pivotal cultural and technological chapter in time, a once-in-a-civilisation crossroads, an epochal shift, during which we are transitioning from an analogue to a digitally-powered existence. The task ahead is to choose whether the system or individual agency will shape the future of humankind. I am dedicated to exploring this as an artist.
My work is a reflection on the nature of the digital and data-enabled connective tissue of a wired-up world, with a focus on themes of origin, identity, meaning and value, looking at who we are, what we make and how we connect. The ceramics I make are metaphors for humankind in this context, and thoughtful or mindful evolution, learning from the vast human knowledge now at our fingertips.
Before doing this, my career was in brand advertising, identity and change management, working with clients across a range of sectors. In 1984, a pivotal moment happened to me. I was involved in launching the Apple Macintosh in the UK in 1984. The way the mouse interacted with my hand and the capabilities it gave me made me realise ‘this changes everything’.
Between then and 2003, I worked at Saatchi & Saatchi and an international brand design agency. In the early 2000’s, I shifted into digital business design, data strategy, digital enablement and quantified organisation, working with a wide range of national and global organisations.
I like ‘firing synapses’, sparking ideas that might help rewire how we see things, and believe that how we connect, organise and power ourselves as one race - the human race - in the face of AI, is a critical issue, one that requires deep examination.
For me, the appropriate response has four parts:
First, promoting the human ability to craft and create.
Secondly, consciously encouraging human imagination and reflective, critical thinking.
Third, by learning from and appreciating the ancients and their wisdom that got us to this point.
Finally, by valuing social and cultural difference and other contemporaries who are not like us. These, to me, are fundamental traits of humankind. They are attributes that have been accumulated over time through the experiences of the generations that have gone before us.
And now, they’re pivotal to our future as the competitive edge we humans have against the power of AI, attributes essential to us and central to humanity’s future as we live through the emergence of the Digital Age.
The actions we are all taking today happen in a speck in time - but together they are shaping humanity’s potential and its future at a critical inflexion point. Never before have we co-existed with an intelligence equal to, or greater than, ourselves. I am compelled by that thought to make work that records this chapter this way, because we must remember and preserve, within ourselves, what it is to be human.
My writing and ceramics are thoughts about this time. I use clay - the recording material of choice for millennia - to mark this in a fashion that will hopefully be built to last, and my work experiences influence the approach I take. It is an apprach that supports an ideal - the ideal of a networked world in which open data drives social innovation, digital empowerment is by collective design, and the development of human individuality, agency and dexterity of art and craft coexist for the advancement of everyone.
That matters, because there’s a globally connected world in development.
Thanks for visiting my site. I hope you’ll find it interesting.