‘I am fascinated by how creative transpositions amongst language systems, animals, plants, raw materials and man-made objects facilitate endless opportunities for meaningful encounters amongst all sorts of agencies.’
– Claudia Fontes

Foreigners are a series of small, palm-sized porcelain sculptures. They depict two or more figures, wrapped in a passionate embrace. The visible intimacy of this embrace provides the sculptures with a certain frailty. This sense of vulnerability is further emphasized by Fontes’ choice of scale and the visible porousness of the sculptures. Fontes started to make the series in response to the English landscape, working with porcelain extracted from English quarries to appropriate a piece of England for herself. She further explains: The choice of scale, material, and the care I put in its fragile construction are an attempt to denaturalize and question the validity of the word “foreigner”, used popularly in England in a pejorative and discriminatory sense. The figurines depict processes of metamorphosis and hybridisation amongst the creatures we share this particular bio-political system with: trees, plants, rocks and fungi. “Foreigner” and “Forest” share the same root, “foris”, which means outside -outside the house, the city, the country, and outside of our own understanding of the world as humans. These Foreigners are an attempt to put out there the question of what it is to be a person in the forest and with the forest, rather than outside of it. Soon enough, the individual figures evolved into families of human-like figures embracing each other, merged into a coral or foam-like matter, as if becoming one.