We Inherit The Fire
MFA thesis show, Tulane University, April 2024
Carroll Gallery, Newcomb Art Department
“...[T]he most central, archetypal symbol of the essence of femininity has always been the vessel.”
- Aschkenasy, Nehama. Eve’s Journey; Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. 70
Made of earth, the first woman is the original vessel, the place from which all of humanity flows. Her womb is the seat of society’s potential. While humanity is a source of great hope, it is also the source of evil and grief; the imperative to control women’s potential to give birth to the chaotic unknown is reinforced by the use of containers (the apple, the box) to tell the origin story of the first woman.
Community-based research has led me to collaborate with herbalist abortion doulas, directly informing my studio practice. Much of our work is shrouded — it is light and shadow on the wall. Some of this work is peer-reviewed and published. The process of expressing this data through sculpture has included a need to expand my definition of vessel. This work is an exploration of how material and shape contain information and convey history. The radically fragile vessel forms in this exhibition demonstrate ambiguity between full and empty and encourage the conviction that objects do not need to be preserved in order to be of value.
I endeavored to expand my vessel definition for almost a year before I understood that it is related to my desire to dissolve binary thinking. Vessels are sculptures. Books are vessels. Brooms are vessels. Scrolls, tapestries, baskets and bodies are vessels. Vessels expand and contract, they are multi-functional. Vessels are common, ceremonial, coveted, discarded, resilient, fragile, burgeoning, barren, virginal, welcoming, lidded, leaking, expectant, exhausted, exalted. Vessels are actors; they have agency.
Overt and unconscious belief about the feminine impacts our response to forms of containment; in decoration and design, vessels inform beliefs about the individual and collective function of people with wombs. We Inherit The Fire is an investigation of several historically ubiquitous domestic objects that attempts to expand what we identify as a vessel and its function. Perhaps this is a path to public policy that prioritizes the ability of people to choose how their own bodies function. A generous understanding of vessel could lead to a less confined definition of the function of woman.
