This new contemporary ceramic art gallery exhibition explores the enduring allure and profound meaning of ceramic boxes.
This fall, Toronto was in for a major discovery of form, function and meaning as Vessels + Sticks, the newly opened contemporary ceramic art gallery, hosted its first major exhibition, What Holds: Ceramic Boxes and the Language of Containment. Displayed in the fall, the exhibition focused on modest lidded vessels, redirecting attention toward how they have established a permanent role in human history, culture and minds.
The exhibition essentially reflected on the act of containment, which is an impulse as ancient as civilization itself. Containers have been used throughout centuries all across the world to store and preserve, guard memories, secrets, identities and spirits. By gathering a diverse group of artists whose practices span generations and geographies, What Holds demonstrated how this ancient form is still echoed in modern ceramics: precise and provisional, useful and symbolic, personal and universal.
Jennifer Kerbel Poirier, founder and director of Vessels + Sticks, shares her insights: “What excites me most about this exhibition is how a seemingly simple lidded form can be transformed into something profoundly meaningful … these works carry layers of history, emotion and imagination, inviting us to reflect on what we choose to protect, conceal or reveal — a question that feels particularly resonant in our everyday lives today.” The exhibition featured the work of six invited artists — Marissa Y. Alexander, Zimra Beiner, Bruce Cochrane, Jess Riva Cooper, Marc Egan and Janet Macpherson — alongside twenty-five artists selected in an international open call. Collectively, they showed the infinite ways in which clay can be moulded into vessels of meaning, from Alexander’s beautifully glazed vessels inspired by nature and memory, to Beiner’s materially rich experiments and Macpherson’s reworking of the animal and human image. Each artist offered a particular dialogue with tradition, while striving to push the practice of ceramics forward.
At its new home at 112 Avenue Rd. in Toronto, Vessels + Sticks has established itself as a crucial space for the display and celebration of ceramic art. The gallery ensures that it is accessible to a growing global base of collectors, artists and enthusiasts through in-person and online exhibitions.
In other words, What Holds was not just an exhibition, it was an invitation to stop and think about all the gestures of creation, the rituals of unveiling and the additional relationships we have with the objects around us. As a result, Vessels + Sticks acknowledges the power of clay not just to contain, but also in its ability to connect.
