Mending Bodies
Vessel for Patience, 2024 (project assistance Erin Brockmier)
A work focused on the patience involved in healing learned through the lessons of clay. Patience, from the latin patient: to suffer. Suffer, from the latin sub: below, and ferre: to bear.
To the root of these words clay lives as teacher of how to bear from below, a squelching wet place that will not be forced, time that must be born on recovering backs in order to shape something beautiful, and be shaped into something beautiful. Clay, a material body that keeps the score, holding the memory of all force and touch impacting it.
Living impacts the world, a footprint in mud, though, can we alter the attitude of that force, gather but not extract? How does this change our relationship to more-than-humans, to coalesce without ownership, the base of which is property, the base of which is permanence. To enter, make, and leave just as light. When does treating a material as something not for the taking turn it from it to she, from her to we as animism breathes relation into the moment, into an ethos of care-full consideration of others.
To the root of these words clay lives as teacher of how to bear from below, a squelching wet place that will not be forced, time that must be born on recovering backs in order to shape something beautiful, and be shaped into something beautiful. Clay, a material body that keeps the score, holding the memory of all force and touch impacting it.
Living impacts the world, a footprint in mud, though, can we alter the attitude of that force, gather but not extract? How does this change our relationship to more-than-humans, to coalesce without ownership, the base of which is property, the base of which is permanence. To enter, make, and leave just as light. When does treating a material as something not for the taking turn it from it to she, from her to we as animism breathes relation into the moment, into an ethos of care-full consideration of others.
Vessel for Patience no. 2, 2024