Vessels
Mysterious, introspective still-lives of vessels in museum collections.
Vessels are a basic need. Every culture in every age develops those utensils and inscribes into them their worldviews. That is why they are used to date archeological sites. Fossils of their former utilitarian lives, they are the black boxes of society.
This series documents them through museums around the world. There are the very old ones (pre-historic even), the everyday ones, the ritual ones, the ornate and the purely functional. They are chosen for their idiosyncrasies, for their visual presence, for their capacity to hold a universe in their self-absorption. More often than not in their original contexts, the busy shelves of museums, they are hidden in plain sight, invisible in the palaces of looking. Isolated though, they sing.
I name each after a friend on Facebook on their birthday (and post the image on their Timeline). They become a calendar of times past, of love. this naming strategy is a funnel for the thousands of images in my archive, dripping each day, one day gained, another lost.