VESSELNESS
On View at the Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery
October 13-29, 2023
A Ceramic Study of Materials, Form, and Process as Metaphors for the Human Experience
The Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery is pleased to present, Vesselness, new works by Monterey based artist Vanessa Cowdrey. An art installation featuring ceramics, and works on paper: drawing, prints, paintings, and photographs. Cowdrey explores materiality, craft, and personal narrative, creating a diaristic landscape of navigable art objects. Her use of found, discarded, unconventional, and repurposed materials both seeks to expand the field of ceramics and invite viewers to question their relationship with the objects around us, ever-present, ever-changing and imbued with emotional charge.
Driven by curiosity surrounding the origins of natural and human-made materials, Cowdrey’s work is centered by her longstanding ceramic practice, supported by her rigorous material research. Her work seeks to question the how, where, and why things are made, driving her creative explorations of form, function, and narrative. So too – invoking the notion of the vessel in all its discursive implications, provoking us to consider the term literally, historically, metaphorically and poetically as a transient energetic form…
What began with a simple curiosity of what happens to objects when they are cast-off, or no longer useful in a traditional sense, this led her to reimagine what an object or material’s long lifespan might include, how many forms might it take after how many eons. Invoking this open-ended investigation creates spaces of wonder intertwined with a complicated relationship with grief as materials change, are lost, are reborn and how these might reflect our own humanity.
In Cowdrey’s work, a ceramic vessel might exist as container for a human lifetime before gravity or carelessness breaks it into shards: the broken fragments remain and do so for thousands of years. Such is the nature of fired clay: over time, the pieces become smaller and smaller, melding with the earth again. A cycle of thousands of years is difficult to imagine, and yet Cowdrey intentionally invites us to the possibility of seeing timescale and thus, lifespans through these works.
