Refracted Journeys

This is the first piece completed in what I hope will be an installation of 20 to 30 unique artworks titled “Refracted Journeys”. My work is hybrid, somewhere between craft and fine art. I use the vessel form not because I am a potter, but because vessels have an inner dimension. An enclosed form is extroverted; it displaces space and interacts with its environment. Imagine the same enclosed form but with a small entrance to an interior. The form suddenly becomes introverted, self-contained; it has an existential presence connected to its mysterious inner space. In the ancient world, vessels were used functionally, but also metaphorically in ritual and literature, employing some of these same ideas of interiority. Looking back to these antecedents, I treat the metaphor of the inner as a resonant subject matter for non-functional ceramic art pieces. My vessels are about their insides as well as their sculpted outsides. Implied are the dichotomies between the inner and outer, the hidden and the seen. Cutting through the wall and changing the angles of the various connecting planes in my complex tessellated patterns, I create deep relief, a dynamic movement that leads the eye to the inside of the vessel.