Alicja Bielawska: The Edge of the Vessel at the Height of My Mouth

“The vessels I create are large; you need two hands to lift a bowl or a vase. They take up space, but they also contain a lot of space within themselves. Wide bowls and tall vases are capacious. You can feel it if you put your hand inside.”

The Edge of the Vessel at the Height of My Mouth gathers together twenty-five of artist Alicja Bielawska’s colored-pencil drawings of (jugs) (vases) (vessels) combined with self-reflective poetry and prose fragments about jugularity in her ceramics work—part of a constellated practice melding sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics, and drawing.

With self-animating pairings of two to four vessels contoured and contouring, embraced and embracing, Bielawska explores variations of intersection, glancing/grazing, what-contains-what, and flatness rising into the sinuous shaping of volume, sometimes incorporating grids radically rippling.

Through haptic prose and poetry, she further enmeshes mediums and materials, as her eyes track the penciling hand across fibrous paper describing the same hand slick with wet clay, palming ceramic air, cupping a jugful of dandelion wine.