MOURNING VESSELS

ABSTRACT

Every pot responds to a different social issue or contemporary event with war, displacement, attacks on human rights, environmental destruction, or moments of moral and psychological collapse. Some of these vessels mourn the loss of life, while others mourn the disappearance of feeling empathy, the truth, justice systems, and even hope. No two vessels are the same because no two tragedies leave the same wounds on an individual. Each carries its own visual language, symbols, and narrative, contributing to a larger collection on what it means to witness suffering in an age of constant information. As these negative narratives happen, the pot, which represents the human condition, starts to crack under the pressure. From the cracks emerge dark, root-like forms that evoke the creeping presence of the Grim Reaper, illustrating how repeated exposure to tragedy slowly takes hold, reshaping our emotional and moral landscape. The series was inspired by Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, in which he described himself as feeling like a broken vessel. Rather than seeing brokenness as a weakness, Van Gogh understood it as part of the human condition and inseparable from his ability to create. Mourning Vessels extends that metaphor, asking how much loss, whether human, moral, or psychological, we can carry before it begins to change who we are.