CRITICAL REFLECTION
About Containing
Most of the objects that I have been working on during the last months have a performative quality in them that can get activated when they are being shown. In the pieces I made by July and exhibited some of them at Wilson Road Camberwell College of Arts, honey was the main material I used for activating them. With those objects I was researching the concepts of love, intimacy, relationships and grief. Honey as a metaphor for love, and in some cases connection and intimacy was the liquid that I poured into those containers for the show.
By recording the process of honey being poured into my ceramic objects and playing the videos at the exhibition, I was able to communicate various qualities of the pieces with the viewers. Each of the objects is unique in the time that it takes for it to pass honey and the time varies from a few seconds to half an hour. These objects require a longer period of attention from the viewer and the narrative behind them plays a significant role in the way the viewer sees them. I believe that these videos help with conveying this narrative to my audience.
Container for my love for Iran
Earthenware ceramic and honey
Generations passing stories
Earthenware ceramic and honey
Big spoon and little spoon
Earthenware ceramic and honey
This vessel like me has been deeply in love
Earthenware ceramic and honey
Container for easily spilled love
Earthenware ceramic and honey
As I have elaborated in the section ‘A Home for Pain’ of my critical reflection, the objects that I make hold feelings and stories. A part of my research was experimenting with the different things that they can contain. The containers for love held honey in them. The piece ‘I carry them everywhere even though it’s painful’ held small stones inside the ceramic pieces. The object ‘Container of my life I were a Deev’ held the syrup of orange blossoms in it. And it was after my July exhibition that I started to work on a new type of containers: containers for pain.
I believe that the two main concepts of holding and containing are two of the main pillars of my current practice. Therefore, learning about the psychological researches for these keywords can be quite meaningful for me. In the essay ‘On holding and containing, being and dreaming’ Ogden explains Winnicott’s idea about ‘holding’ and Bion’s idea about ‘containing. “Holding, for Winnicott, is an ontological concept that he uses to explore the specific qualities of the experience of being alive at different developmental stages as well as the changing intrapsychic- interpersonal means by which the sense of continuity of being is sustained over time.” “Bion’s idea of the container-contained addresses not what we think, but the way we think, that is, how we process lived experience and what occurs psychically when we are unable to do psychological work with that experience.” (Ogden, 2004)
What I came across while I was making containers for pain, was similar to Winnicott’s explanation of ‘depressive position’. “For Winnicott (1954), the depressive position involves one's holding for oneself an emotional situation over time.” (Ogden, 2004) By closing off, we try to limit the pain that we incur yet we end up closing the way for it to go out as well.
Container for pain #3
Earthenware ceramic
While I was working on the containers for pain, my research became more focused on the different materials that these objects can contain. Some examples come as the following:
Container for pain #1:
Boiled water of black horseradish
I remember that when I was a teenager and my dad had kidney stone, he used to drink the boiled water of black horseradish as it was said that it is helpful with that condition. My dad said it tasted very bad, yet he had to drink it to get read of the kidney stones.
Homeland:
Light
Getting Out:
Containers
Container for mournful songs:
Sound
Negar:
A bowl surrounded by loneliness
This vessel like me has been deeply in love:
Honey
In the piece ‘Getting Out’ the performative quality of my practice was developed to a next level by me doing a performance in public for activating the work. I have explained the performance’s references to the contextual analyses of my research in the section ‘Getting Out’ of the critical reflection.
Ashkan Behjou’s ceramic objects also have an emphasis on containing. In his ceramic objects called Ashk (which means tear in Farsi but can also be a short form of artist’s name) the solid grey sphere contains beautiful colourful Moqrans. The forms of these Moqrans are quite similar to the forms that can be seen in Islamic Architecture in Iran.
(Henri Stierlin, Stierlin and Buchet, 2012)
I will be holding a workshop at the Research Festival in December 2022 named ‘Seeing myself in clay’. In this workshop I will provide different materials such as honey, water, electric candles, salt, old pictures, written poems, spices, oil, pigment etc. and also some of my ceramic objects. I will encourage the attendees to use these materials to interact with the ceramic objects in a way that has a metaphorical meaning for them about their life stories or feelings. I look at this workshop as a part of my research as I get to see how other people will see and get involved with my ceramic objects. I am hopeful that this workshop gives me new ideas about holding, containing and letting go.
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References:
Henri Stierlin, Stierlin, A. and Buchet, A. (2012). Persian art & architecture. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Anon, (n.d.). Designed Objects – Ashkan Behjou. [online] Available at: https://ashkanbehjou.com/index.php/designed-objects/ [Accessed 20 Nov. 2022].
Ogden, T.H. (2004). On holding and containing, being and dreaming. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85(6), pp.1349–1364. doi:10.1516/t41h-dgux-9jy4-gqc7.