Category Archives: vessels

From Studio to Printed Page: The Vessel Alchemy Catalog

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The space inside the vessel
is not absence —
it is invitation.

I am genuinely delighted to share this catalog of my students’ work from last week’s Vessel Alchemy workshops. Each time I teach, I am reminded that learning moves in both directions. My students bring courage, curiosity, humor, tenderness, and insight to the table — and I leave each session changed by what they discover.

What follows in this post are a few reflections and observations about this collection of vessels — forms that began as simple structures and became layered, personal, and deeply expressive works. At the end of this post, you’ll find a link to view the complete catalog as a flipbook, where you can explore the entire collection in sequence.

First observation: When I first began teaching vessel workshops in Ireland three years ago, I noticed a shift in purpose. Students were not simply building forms that could hold something — they were building forms that already held something. The vessels were not empty containers waiting to be filled; they arrived filled. Words were tucked into scrolls. Fragments of memory were embedded in plaster. A scrap of handwriting, a small relic, a suggestion of something once carried — each vessel became a small assemblage, a layered narrative.

The vessel, in other words, became less about function and more about meaning. It became a site of gathering — of memory, of language, of intention. Even the simplest forms carried interior lives. You can see so much of this is our new catalog for the Vessels Alchemy class.

Secondly, when I began assembling the catalog, I took a small liberty. As I laid out the pages and lived with each photograph, I found myself responding to the pieces as a viewer as well as a teacher. So I gave each vessel a title — and three words that, to my eye, seemed to describe its spirit. I claimed this as a prerogative of the teacher :). Not to define the work, but to honor how it spoke to me.

It felt fitting. If vessels can hold memory and meaning, they can also hold interpretation.

As you turn the pages of the catalog, I hope you find sparks of inspiration not just for making vessels, but for discovering what creativity means in all its many forms — and that this journey invites you into your own act of making, curious and wholehearted.

CATALOG LINK

So many thanks to the students for sharing their narratives and creative skills!

♥

The Language of Holding: Student Work from the Workshop

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This is Part One of a two-part reflection on our weekend workshop,  Vessel Alchemy: Tactile Poems in Fiber, Paper, Word, Light. Next week, I’ll share more vessels — and more of the words they are quietly holding.

This past weekend weekend, as I walked around the Droste Studio at UTSA/SW watching the students work, I found myself truly astonished.

Not just at the craftsmanship — though there was plenty of that. Careful joins. Thoughtful armatures. Fibers handled with restraint. Plaster edges left raw but intentional. Stitches placed where they mattered. Nothing hurried. Nothing ornamental without purpose.

What moved me even more deeply was the respect for the materials. These students did not force sticks to behave unnaturally. They allowed cheesecloth to fray. They let paper tear along its own logic. They treated wax, fiber, wood, and found objects as collaborators rather than supplies. There is a joy in that kind of making.

But what truly stopped me was their understanding of language.

  • They understood — instinctively — that words do not merely decorate a vessel.
    They define it.
    They anchor it.
    They release it.

They grasped that words can be embedded like relics, stitched like mending, burned like memory, or inscribed along the interior curve of a bowl. They understood that a vessel does not simply hold words — it is shaped by them.

Here are three examples that I’ve tried to describe with words that mean more than size, shape, and color:

The Interior Script: A Bowl That Remembers

One student (Logan) lined the inside of his vessel with concentric, handwritten text. The words spiral inward, like thought itself. Over this interior landscape rests a simple lattice of thin wooden sticks, bound gently with gray thread — a structure that feels protective, almost like ribs. Actually, it cradles a second structure that fits inside this one like a Russian doll! I’ll show you that picture later.

The vessel invokes words like:

  • remember
    contain
    listen
    underneath
    crossing

The spiral script suggests that meaning accumulates over time, layer upon layer, sentence upon sentence. The wooden lattice feels like a quiet restraint — or perhaps a trellis. The words are both sheltered and structured. The vessel becomes a meditation on interior life. Here is the vessel with its nested second vessel – the scrip becomes secret language. The second vessel is lined with gold joss paper. Breathtaking!

The Furrowed Edge: A Vessel of Shelter and Weather

Another student (Carol) created a bowl with torn, irregular edges, rimmed in dark fiber that reads almost like char or earth. Across its opening stretches a small bundle of paper and twigs — bound, weathered, fragile.

This vessel calls forth words like:

  • weathered
    threshold
    endurance
    tenderness
    scar

The torn plaster edge feels vulnerable but deliberate. The dark fiber suggests something elemental — soil, ash, hair, memory. Can you guess what it is? The bound paper at the top feels like a message carried across a crossing. It is not pristine. It is honest. The vessel speaks of protection that has already been tested.

Two Vessels: What Opens / What Remains

These are two vessels created by Dawn, who made a total of five beautiful containers for her words and poems during the two days we were together.

The Luminous Vessel (Left)

This one feels like a breath held and then released.

It evokes:

  • revelation
    offering
    interior light
    vulnerability
    threshold
    secret treasure

There is something tender about its torn white rim. The glowing interior suggests not wealth, but illumination — the kind of light discovered only after something cracks open. The twig-bound element across the top feels less like restraint and more like a blessing.

This vessel whispers:
What is hidden is not lost.
What is broken may be luminous.

The Earth Vessel (Right)

This one feels grounded, sedimentary, layered.

It evokes:

  • memory
    accumulation
    archive
    weathered
    gathered fragments
    ancestral
    talisman
    burial
    keeping
    endurance

The interior reads almost like an excavation — objects embedded, tucked, remembered. The textures feel archaeological. The upright slip of paper suggests a marker, a naming, a quiet declaration among relics.

This vessel’s words are:
Nothing is wasted.
What has been lived becomes structure.

Together

As a pair, they evoke:

light and earth
reveal and retain
blessing and burial
opening and holding
chapter and echo
same story, different hour

They feel like two movements in a single composition — one speaking of illumination, the other of preservation.

______________________________________________________

A final note for this first part – what I saw in these works was not just technique. It was comprehension.

The students understood that when we write inside a vessel, we are mapping an interior. When we bind sticks across an opening, we are negotiating protection and permeability. When we leave an edge torn, we are honoring imperfection rather than correcting it.

They were not simply making objects. They were making language visible. Visible poetry.

And maybe that is what we are always doing — whether with plaster or paper, ink or fiber. We are shaping containers for what matters. We are giving our unspoken words somewhere to rest.

Let’s hope we continue to make vessels that hold what needs holding — and release what no longer does. More to come next week!

Words as Vessels, Vessels as Words

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Valentine weekend will be fun for me – I’m teaching a new Vessels workshop at UTSA/SA.

“Vessel Alchemy: Tactile Poems in Fiber, Paper, Word, and Light” — In this immersive workshop, we’ll explore how simple materials—sticks, cheesecloth, mulberry paper, fiber scraps, ink — can be transformed into poetic vessels that speak to memory, meaning, and the ephemeral.” 

As I’ve been preparing for this workshop, I’ve found myself thinking less about techniques and materials and more about what, exactly, we are making room for. I’ve been gathering sticks, paper, fiber, cheesecloth, ink—simple things—but alongside them, I’ve been gathering words. Not lists or instructions, but the kind of words that hover quietly in the background: hold, carry, contain, remember.

Planning the workshop has reminded me that vessels are never only about form. They are about intention. They exist because there is something we want to keep safe, transport, offer, or remember. And somewhere in that realization, it became clear why words so often find their way into my vessel work.

Words and vessels share the same essential function: they are containers.

A single word can carry astonishing weight. Think of words like home, empty, threshold, tenacity. These are not tidy definitions. They are dense with lived experience, layered with personal and collective history. Over time, they gather residue—who spoke them, who heard them, who needed them. A word becomes a place we return to, again and again, to see what has changed. Echo. Imprint. Signature.

Vessels work in much the same way. A bowl is never just a bowl. It holds what we place inside it, but also what it has held before—food, offerings, tools, fragments, ashes. Its shape remembers use. Its surface records touch. Even when empty, a vessel is never truly vacant.

When I place words inside a vessel—stitched, written, rolled up, partially obscured—I’m not asking them to explain anything. I’m giving them a physical body, a structure that can hold their weight.

This is why I’m drawn to fragments rather than sentences. A single word doesn’t close a story—it opens one. It invites the viewer to bring their own associations, their own memory, their own interior language. The vessel doesn’t dictate; it listens.

What’s the saddest word you can think of? What’s the most beautiful word?
Sometimes they are the same word, depending on when you return to them. Ernest Hemingway wrote an entire short story with just six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” A handful of words conjure an entire life we can never step into.

I’m planning lessons about making vessels with words and verses, but I’m aware that what we’re really doing is learning how to listen—to materials, to memory, to language itself. We don’t pour meaning into words so much as discover what they already hold.

This is where the alchemy happens. A word becomes a container. A vessel becomes a sentence. 

Choose one word –
It might be the saddest word you know.
Or the funniest.
Or the most beautiful.
. . .it will pop into the front of your mind.

Write it down.

Now sit with it for a moment—not to define it, but to enter it.
Ask yourself:

  • When did this word first matter to me?

  • Why has it appeared again, unexpectedly?

  • What does it hold now that it didn’t before?

Notice how the word has changed—not on the page, but in you.
How it carries memory, feeling, and time, all at once.

You don’t need to explain it.
You don’t need to share it.

Just notice how a single word can become a place you return to—
and how each return leaves it slightly altered,
packed with that particular weight we call meaning.

♥

Fragments, Forms & Layers: Part Two

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Last week, the remarkable artist and teacher Crystal Marie Neubauer invited me to speak with her online community about my work — an honor, and also an unexpected challenge. How do you describe an art practice that moves fluidly through so many materials? Encaustic, collage, clay, fiber, found objects… it’s never been about one medium.

What I realized is that my work is held together not by technique but by form and intention. Three recurring paths kept surfacing:

Santos & Shards — guardians, icons, and the stories held in fragments
Vessels — boats, bowls, pods, and the metaphor of holding
Layered Images — collage, wax, and the quiet revelations inside transparency

These forms thread through everything I make and shape how I think about narrative, memory, devotion, and protection. This three-part series grew from that conversation with Crystal’s group — an invitation to look more closely at how these paths emerge and how others might recognize echoes of their own practice along the way.

Part 2: Vessels of Holding — Forms That Carry Memory

A three-part series on Fragments, Vessels & Layers

In PART ONE, we talked about shards and stories and fragments.

If fragments are the invitations, vessels are the responses — the forms we create when we need to hold something gently, carry something forward, or protect something fragile. In my work, vessels have always been metaphors for care: what we shelter, what we offer, what we carry alone, and what we carry together.

This part of the series turns to the second creative path in my practice, one shaped deeply by my time teaching Spirit Vessels & Boats in Ireland. That workshop showed me how universally we understand the language of vessels — not just as objects, but as personal metaphors.

NOTE: If you read to the bottom of the post, there is some information about a new in-person Vessels workshop coming up in February.

Vessels as Small Architectures for Memory

A vessel is more than a container. It’s a small architecture — a structure built from tenderness and intention.

In my own studio, I return again and again to:

  • cane lashed into curved frames,

  • mulberry paper toughened with wax,

  • bits of rusted metal becoming anchors,

  • fiber and thread creating protection or boundary.

Each material changes the meaning of what the vessel carries. Wax, especially, offers a luminous kind of shelter — the sense that something is being preserved inside layers of translucence.

Teaching in Ireland: A Workshop of Passage and Light

When I taught this work in Mulranny, surrounded by sea light, tidal flats, and the slow breathing of the bay, my students immediately understood that they were making more than objects. They were making carriers — of memory, metaphor, hope, grief, gratitude.

Their vessels took on astonishing variety:

  • Some resembled wind-bent boats, as if carrying stories across an invisible tide.

  • Some were seed-like pods holding untold wishes.

  • Some were protective containers woven from cane, stitched paper, and beeswax, glowing like small lanterns.

There was a shared sense that these forms — however small — were honoring something beyond themselves.

Interior Space / Exterior Form

One of the most compelling conversations in the workshop was about the relationship between:

  • the space inside the vessel,

  • the form surrounding it,

  • and the meaning created by the tension between the two.

In a vessel, the interior always matters. It holds the intention. The exterior only reveals part of the story — the rest is protected within. This interplay mirrors how we move through the world: showing some things, guarding others, and trusting the container to hold what words cannot.

_________________________________________

Speaking of words, I am teaching a new two-day in-person Vessel workshop next year on Valentines Day weekend at UTSA/SW. It’s called Vessel Alchemy: Tactile
Poems in Fiber , Paper , Word, Light. Here’s a partial description from the catalog:

“In this immersive workshop, we’ll explore how simple
materials (sticks, cheesecloth, mulberry paper, fiber scraps,
ink) can be transformed into vessels that speak to memory,
meaning, and the ephemeral. Each day invites an unfolding
of form and story as we sculpt, wrap, write, embed, and
embellish.”

We’ll be doing some writing – words and poems and asemic mark making – here is a beautiful example from my friend Jean Dahlgren, who will be my TA for this class.

I love Jean’s asemic writing – she’s promised to write some lines on tissue paper for us to use in the workshop!

Workshop Registration for Friends of the School opens today, and it opens to the public on December 9th. I’d love to see you there!

If you can’t make it to the in-person workshop in February, you are welcome to checkout my online workshop called Spirit & Form: Creating Vessels of Passage and Purpose.

Here is a link to a sample lesson and the registration information. It’s self-paced and only $59 for lifetime access.

Inviting You Into the Studio: What Are You Carrying?

Even if you’ve never lashed cane or dipped mulberry paper into wax, you’ve likely made vessels in your own way — forms that hold meaning.

So here are some studio invitations for your own practice:

  • Could a boat, bowl, pod, or wrapped bundle be a metaphor waiting to be explored?

  • What would a “protective container” look like in your materials?

  • What happens when you build a structure around an emotion, a memory, or a small sacred object?

  • What materials in your studio feel inherently protective — wax, fiber, metal, clay?

A vessel doesn’t need to be functional to be truthful. It can simply be a place where meaning rests.

Looking Ahead

Next week, in Part Three, I’ll explore the last of the three intertwined paths: Layered Images — how veiled surfaces, hidden elements, and translucent strata reveal what is usually unseen.