Madrid and the Shift to Porcelain

For the first year of this project, every plaque was hand-cut and hand-glazed ceramic — solid, a little rough at the edges, each one slightly different from the last because I was shaping and firing them myself, one at a time.

Madrid, in June 2025, is where that changed. I brought a new version of the piece to the city — same formula, same “5=3,” but cast in porcelain rather than built by hand in clay. Porcelain takes a mould, which means more consistency and a finer, whiter finish than the earlier ceramic pieces, but it also meant giving up some of the handmade irregularity that had defined the project up to that point.

For a whole year now, my street art has been saying: “You're not alone! You're strong! And this will pass.” This week in Madrid — a new version of the piece — new style and colour. Cast porcelain.

It wasn't a small decision. Changing materials meant relearning a process — new moulds, new firing temperatures, new ways for a piece to fail before it succeeds. But a year in, I wanted the project to be able to grow past what I could shape entirely by hand, one plaque at a time, and porcelain casting opened that door.

I don't think of these material shifts as upgrades exactly — porcelain isn't better than the ceramic I started with, just different, with its own limits and its own kind of beauty. A cracked plate that turned into five small plaques instead taught me the same thing from another angle: the material keeps pushing back, and the project keeps adjusting to what it will and won't allow. That's probably the real throughline, more than any single material — a formula that stays exactly the same, wrapped in whatever the clay, the porcelain, or the kiln that week decides to allow.

Madrid's plaque was the first to carry that new material out into the world. It wouldn't be the last — the pregnancy-test posters and the sticker sheets that came later both grew out of the same instinct: keep the formula exactly the same, and keep experimenting with everything else.