Ceramics
These objects use utilitarian design—wheel thrown vessels, letterpress printing, and desktop publishing—as a starting point for expressions of personal and cultural memory.
The texts are remnants of poems, stories, and dreams, fragments read and remembered—words that become incantations and offerings.
Embedding these messages in clay and firing them in the kiln is an attempt to distill and purify anxiety, transmuting a worried mind—shape-shifting the objects and the words that mark them.
They become vessels—reliquaries, eggs, boxes, amulets—that carry messages from a world both found and imagined.
Closed and open, these containers are both practical and spiritual. Like worry beads and rosaries, talismans and totems, they belong to the class of things that marry language and matter, and assume that some things can’t be seen by looking directly at them.
—Bonnie Campbell