LIVING URN

“It is astounding, he says, how long these thin-walled clay urns remained intact a yard underground, while the sword and ploughshare passed above them and great buildings, palaces and cloud-high towers crumbled and collapsed.”

—Sir Thomas Brown from Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

—Melted red hot within crucibles, an offering, shaped in clay, hammered but still fragile, a depression in earth collecting runoff, hidden beneath sediment and soil, layered up and woven through time, yet contained out of reach in some corner of a dusty shelf. . .

Living Urn brings together artists using vessels to challenge temporality. Not all of the works evoke burial urns directly, but rather use containers as a sight to hold the spirit of one’s identity as entangled with the life of crafted and found objects. What vessels feel earnest enough to hold incomplete histories and speculations? When do they disregard the limits of material reality to collapse eternal desires and the external world? With their often ornamented and enigmatic surfaces, these living urns reanimate through their makers as they harness their suddenly immortal contents and manifest new existences—to live out life indefinitely, passing through personhood and back to object again. The distinction between living and nonliving becomes fused and glowing, asking for its silence to be decoded.

CURATED BY MICHAEL GUNN, MADELINE MENKES, MARSHALL BAKER