Text Messages: Clay and Print
New Work by Bonnie Campbell.

A series of vessels that began as worries and ended as prayers.

RECEPTION Friday, Oct 17 6-9pm

These objects use utilitarian design—wheel thrown vessels, letterpress printing, and desktop publishing—as a starting point for expressions of personal and cultural memory.

The texts are remnants of poems, stories, and dreams, fragments read and remembered, that haunted me—words that become incantations and offerings.

Embedding these messages in clay and firing them in the kiln is an attempt to distill and purify anxiety, transmuting a worried mind—shape-shifting the objects and the words that mark them.

They become vessels—reliquaries, eggs, boxes, amulets—that carry messages from a world both found and imagined.

Closed and open, these containers are both practical and spiritual. Like worry beads and rosaries, talismans and totems, they belong to the class of things that marry language and matter, and assume that some things can’t be seen by looking directly at them.
—Bonnie Campbell

Bonnie Campbell is a Durham potter and graphic designer. She graduated from Berea College in Kentucky, where she was trained as a studio potter in the Ceramic Apprenticeship Program. Currently she is the Art Director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.