I make vessels, but I am a vessel too

thinking with #1

As I’m here in Richmond making vessels, I am thinking with a few ideas, books, scientific studies, geological processes, questions, thinkers, etc. So, because I’ve somehow gotten into a groove of writing to y’all every week, I thought I’d share who and what I’m thinking with as I effort toward making work while here on my artist residency with the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, VA.

Straining local Richmond clay that will be used as slip and a clay body of its own while working as an Artist-in-Residence in Richmond, VA. July 2024.

In no particular order:

• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff

• Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society by Dr. Arline T Geronimus

• Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley

• The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison

• Desire Paths—here + here.

• Erosion (as the desire line of water.)¹

• How poverty and racism 'weather' the body, accelerating aging and disease via NPR

• Allostatic Load

• Epigenetics & telomeres

• ALP Hybrid Forms

• Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

• Black monument matters: Place-based commemoration and abolitionist memory work by Alex A. Moulton

• Touching the Earth by bell hooks

• How the Soil Remembers Plantation Slavery by R.L. Martens and BII Robertson

• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• The Memory of Clay

• Soil Science and what listening to the soil can tell us about our relationship with the land

• The Shapes of Water

I’m here in Richmond on an artist residency with the Visual Arts Center of Richmond to build upon my current practice, think, rest, and explore new ways of working with ceramics using natural materials.²

As ever, prayers up to the kiln gods.

more soon,
Gabrielle

1. thank you to Kristen for sharing a work in progress in our Hybrid Forms group which led Jessica to comment on the desire lines of water during our discussion of said work in progress. those five words “the desire lines of water” literally have not left my mind since.

2. I came to Richmond thinking I would make work related to one area of my practice and have ended up in a totally different place of said practice…but that is how the work goes. the clay also decides. Spirit also has its things to say and share. I make vessels, but I am a vessel too. I make vessels, but I am a vessel too.

I make vessels, but I am a vessel too.