Ceramic artist Stanley Tong set out on a project to answer one devastating question: “How much damage does gun violence really do?”
To explore this query, he decided to literally shoot his work with a series of guns.
“I figured there’s no better way than by using real guns and real bullets on my artwork,” Tong said in a recent TikTok video.
The results are his collection of pots and vases that were all sculpted by Tong, many of which resemble urns. While the clay was still wet, Tong shot them from 20 or 30 feet away, creating heartbreaking “entrance and exit wounds” in the sculptures.
He used a variety of weapons, including a .357 Magnum, .22 Long Rifle, a .9mm handgun, and more.
“Clay doesn’t heal,” Tong explained. “So this is how much energy a .357 Magnum really has when that impact is frozen in time.”
The pieces were also pit-fired, which is different from the well-known kiln method. It includes digging a hole in the ground, burying the pottery alongside combustibles like sawdust and gunpowder, and lighting them on fire.
(This feels like a good time to mention that you probably shouldn’t replicate this project at home.)
“A really cool thing that happened is the lead from the bullets actually oxidized in the pit fire,” Tong pointed out in his video. “You can see that it left all these interesting yellow marks.”
The resulting pots are both sobering and stunning, showing permanent marks of damage both inside and out of the vase’s silhouette. Most apparent are the massive ‘wounds,’ which even after firing, look as though they’ve been torn open with reckless abandon. Which — of course — they were.
Tong explained his process in another video, too, which shows how he used a .22 Long Rifle to shoot a piece seven times.
“It’s really difficult to tell from this pot what the exit and entrance [wounds] are, so the way I tell is by looking inside the pot… because as the bullet comes through, it blows out this back wall of clay and splatters it along the interior of the pot.”
Shot alongside two other pieces, one urn also shows “collateral damage” splatters from the gunshots of another sculpture. Another piece in the collection began as a small urn shape, and after being shot, was no longer recognizable.
“Obviously, clay is not a real one-to-one representation of any specific substance… but it’s a vehicle for the metaphor I’m trying to create,” Tong said. “Even if you aren’t directly shot by the bullets, being adjacent to a gun violence incident can still scar you forever.”
The visceral nature of Tong’s collection — aptly titled “Thoughts & Prayers” — forces viewers to engage with the devastating reality of gun violence, knowing that these massive wounds are more often inflicted on human bodies than in clay.
“The interesting thing is that we’re so desensitized to gun violence, you know?” Tong said in his TikTok. “We see movies all the time; it’s on the news way too much.”
The collection was shown in a solo exhibition by the artist, where he held a silent auction to raise funds for Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit formed by the family members of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December of 2012.
The poetry of “using pieces that were created through gun violence to actually raise money for gun violence protection” was important to Tong, who raised a total of $1,685 for the organization.
And as the behind-the-scenes process of the “Thoughts & Prayers” series reaches a wider audience on social media, Tong’s artistic approach to addressing this issue seems to be resonating in a powerful way.
“Brilliant,” one TikTok commenter wrote on Tong’s page. “Ceramics is one of the oldest art forms, there’s almost nothing more innately human than pottery.”
Header images courtesy of Stanley Tong/TikTok
