“Vitals”, or “vital vessels”. These are ceramic sculptural vessels which are highly imagined and inaccurate ideas of internal organs. Some parts of these sculptures are influenced by my very poor knowledge of anatomy that has come from anatomical diagrams, religious imagery, random information, or likely misinformation I’ve come across on the internet, and more generally just a curiosity and anxiety about what’s even going on in there.
The initial inspiration for this series was images of ancient votives - often inaccurate anatomical depictions which carried both emotional and monetary value – given as a kind of offering across many times and cultures, and still now, to ask for healing, and both physical and metaphorical wellness. There were many interesting examples of votives of internal organs, viscera which were wildly inaccurate, such as wombs which were much more like seep’s wombs than humans, or intestines which look like random tubes. These images really struck me as very relatable and intuitive striving to understand our own bodies. And I realised that I too could not truly model an accurate depiction of the inside of my own body either.
I like to create things you can pick up. Ancient examples of terracotta votives which I looked at for inspiration are hand sized. These sculptures are scaled up quite a lot, perhaps these are more hug-sized, than hand sized.
I like to photograph them either with me cradling them, or presented here on beds, which I also wanted to look vaguely like some squishy amorphous viscera of the body.
On the other hand, ceramic is delicate, and people are scared to touch it, but this delicacy also gives it a sense of preciousness, and you must handle them gently when you pick them up. At the same time ceramic objects are one of the most long-lasting kinds of material objects in human history.
To me these votive vitals are most simply an ode to the very human anxious curiosity around illness, wellness, and health, and the ways that these insecurities have been, and continue to be attempted to be comforted, or preyed upon, or understood.
When I think about my work, I treat bodies as vessels and thus consider my ceramic vessels as a kind of representations of the body. I really love working in ceramics, and it’s been my primary medium since graduating as I’m lucky to have great ceramic studio facilities.
The thinking around vessels is influenced by Ursula Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which is an incredible essay that re-centres the carrying vessel as the first human technology rather than the weapon, and in this way retells the story of human evolution.
In this vein, I think of vessels, pots, stomachs and bodies as ‘cultural carrier bags’, or in other words I think of these vessels as carrying the experiences, narratives, ideas and ‘stuff’ of the living.
I hope that my work is both strange and comforting, allowing others to confront the anxieties of being in a body in a playful yet sensitive way.