Containers

Early this summer I spent two weeks at an art residency at Walkaway House in North Adams, Massachusetts with my dear friend Katie Coughlin. We worked to make a large fabric canopy based on the structure of a spiderweb, meant to be suspended under a tree as a leaf catcher. 

I met Katie our first year of grad school in our freshman seminar. One of our first assignments was to teach the class how to do something that was important to our practice. When it was Katie’s turn, she stood, gave all of us a ball of clay, and without words, demonstrated how to pinch a pot.

 Katie is the queen of containers. In her functional ceramic practice she makes bowls, umbrella stands, Christmas tree stands, measuring cups, candlestick holders, things that hold things. Her thoughts of containers expand to the body as a vessel, attuned to movement, gesture, and relationships of space.

Throughout the residency we began to measure things by a scale that was either relative to our bodies or our environment. We realized we didn’t have a tape measurer, so Katie began pacing out measurements with her feet. The shape of the canopy was determined by the dimensions of our workspace, which was long and narrow, shifting the form from a circular spiderweb to an oval. The heights and holding points of our installation of the canopy in a tree was defined by our aim, how high we could throw weighted lengths of string, and the dimensions and shape of the tree itself.

My body has been a container for my son, and it shows. My son Charlie is sixteen months old now, walking and falling frequently, bumping his head, losing his balance, falling hard on his knees, his butt, his little hands. My instinct, especially when I can see that it particularly startled him or hurt, is to scoop him up, hold his whole body close against my soft torso, cradle his head into my shoulder, attempt to reassure him, physically, metaphysically “it is ok. it hurts. feel my arms around you? there is protection, there is recovery, there is beginning again, there is comfort.”

 In a conversation titled “The Body’s Grace”, Krista Tippett interviews Matthew Sanford, a paralyzed yoga practitioner whose work is focused on bringing the mind and body back together. He’s also a father. In the interview, he describes the act of physically comforting his young son as an act of containing. He says “There’s a reason why, when my son – he’s six—is crying, he needs a hug. It’s not just that he needs my love; he needs boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed, and it won’t be limiting his whole being. He gets a hug, and he drops into his body. And when you drop into your body, paradoxically, typically, pain is less.”

In North Adams, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has a permanent piece of the artist James Turrell, who is famous for playing with light as a material. The piece, titled C.A.V.U., is a large, wide, silo-like structure. The circular interior is lined with viewing bench. Like the Pantheon, there is an open oculus at the top of the domed structure that frames the sky. It’s a container without containing, that opens up an expanse of endless sky.

Maira Kalman, a painter, writer, mother, writes “Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly happy or content, I think I can provide sustenance for legions of human beings. I can hold the entire world in my arms. Other times, I can barely cross the room. And I drop by arms. Frozen.”

Throughout the residency we had many names for our form: spiderweb, parachute, net, leaf catcher. We had carefully chosen a color palette of whites and blues, largely responding to the materials we had at hand. Katie texted me a week or so after the residency asking, “should we start referring to it as a cloud?” We had taken a large pair of scissors and cut a shape from the sky. We coaxed the cloud down and wrapped it around a tree.

Sources:

“The Body’s Grace”, interview with Matthew Sanford, On Being with Krista Tippet

https://onbeing.org/programs/matthew-sanford-the-bodys-grace-2023/

 Kalman, Maira. Women Holding Things. United States: HarperCollins, (n.d.).