Activation
Vessel thinking, vessel making
Clay is as fragile and vulnerable as our bodies, and comes from the ancestral bed of rivers and seas. Holding clay in your hands we invite you to consider a vessel beyond its immediate meaning, but as a worldmaking shape shifting process and react to:
Sitting by a body of water
Sit with the word vessel - what does the word vessel mean to you?
Vessel…
Visualise a vessel,
Is it a plant, forest, a container, a gathering, a ship, a fishing net, a membrane, a body, multiple bodies, an object, a colour, a coral reef, a womb?
How was this vessel? Where is this vessel?
Have you been given a vessel?
Is it you now imagining a vessel,
What are its dimensions, its arrangements?
If you can feel it, what does this vessel collect? hold? escape?
Is it a form that holds or one that allows for movement and shapeshifting?
What are the architectures of this vessel?
Material migrations? Gathering spaces?
What space is this vessel?
If your vessel murmurates
What is this vessel sharing with you? How does it sound?
How might it vibrate? re-sonate? If it would be a soundtrack for waters, how would it sing?
What a vessel can be in times of collision and crises, in times of fugitivity and re-worlding? a murmur? A gathering? An offering?
What unfolds from your vessel?
If you can give it meaning what would it be? Who would you share it with?
How would this sharing be?
And finally,
How does your vessel dialogues and resonate with the body of water you are sitting with? What does this vessel mean, what is this vessel? What does your vessel dream?
What does your vessel reimagine and how can it be reimagined? Is it one thing or many things at the same time?
Shared as part of Tidal Diaries C4PP
repository
[EN] Throughout our three immersions we have thought of acts of return, of gratitude, of holding each other and our multiple worlds as they collide together in embracing waters of rivers and seas.
The one word Vessel is a world in itself, a word that worlds and un-worlds; that holds multiple meanings and multiple worlds, stories, memories, desires and violences. When our last day in the Thames a text from Christina Sharpe came to us - the text ‘Vessel in the Round’ (published in Theaster Gates, Black Chapel (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2023) that stems from Sharpe’s long work on ‘What is a vessel’, while reminding us of how Ursula Le Guin in the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction describes a vessel as a Colombian mochila, a shape, container, bag, body, ship and as narrative networks capable of transporting us in time and space.
A vessel, Jess Rowley’s invitation in this immersion, transported us to the multiple vessels we had encountered in Brazil, Colombia and the UK, and the multiplicity of meanings, forms and symbolisms they have taken, and the many ways in which they shapeshifted.