Before moving to the Netherlands, I had almost never cooked. Between 2019 and 2021, I began cooking and documenting the process — learning ingredients through repetition, success, and failure. It felt less like cooking and more like learning to speak.

From this, I constructed a language. Each ceramic sculpture I made — irregular, spotted with black, shaped by mood — was assigned to an ingredient or seasoning. Each was also paired with a sound: a fragment from my niece’s voice recordings. Sculpture, ingredient, sound: one word. A dish became a sentence.

The vocabulary of this language was limited by what I could find in everyday Dutch supermarkets — Albert Heijn, Jumbo, and similar stores. Over time, I found myself repeating the same sentences.

This language exists as a closed system. In Part I, I present a dictionary and tutorial video outlining its internal logic — a structure that cannot be understood outside itself. In Part II, I cook the sculptures, treating them as ingredients and speaking through preparation. The background audio is an interview with schizophrenia patients. Listening, I couldn’t always tell if they were describing the illness or describing what it means to be an artist.