spring 2021-present

I began to sculpt. Using the pages from my mother’s decades-old, discarded dictionary, I began feverishly sculpting bowls in papier-mache, from tiny bud vases to shrub-sized planters. I couldn’t have said why I was making them; it felt like a compulsion I didn’t understand, born of a burst of energy I couldn’t account for. That is, until one day: I looked up from my work, hands and arms sticky and covered in wheatpaste, and realized I was surrounded by vessels of all shapes and sizes. At last, somewhere to put all the excess emotional weight I was carrying; finally, buckets to store my excess grief.

From this realization, Vessels was born. I began my attempt to answer the questions that plagued me at the depths of my depression: When it all becomes too much, and we can no longer balance the intensity of grief with the reality of living, how can we safely set it down and return for it when we’re ready? And if we can fill some external vessels with our deepest grief, how can we gracefully carry it with us? I keep returning to an image: a body moving, tied to full bowls, tethered, but graceful. Nothing compartmentalized, nothing bottled up, just placed in storage and carried in tow.

I hauled all the vessels I made that spring up to Subcircle residency in Biddeford, Maine. I spent ten days redesigning my vessels, waterproofing them, tying them to things, and floating them on the frigid ocean. I swam with them, posed them on rocks, and wrote pages of stories I wanted to tell.