Sprited Vessels

Spirit Vessels: They Who Return is a body of wheel-thrown vessel-portraiture rooted in Yoruba memory, where the vessel is not an object but a body asked to stay. In the old understanding, the abiku is the spirit-child who comes and goes, born into a family only to slip away and return, again and again, caught in the long passage between worlds. To hold such a child here, the elders turned to the skin. They cut ila into the body, marks of recognition and belonging, so the soul could be named, claimed, and loved into remaining. The scar was never a wound alone. It was a request. Stay.

Each vessel in this series carries those marks. Wheel-thrown and altered in stoneware, finished in coloured slips and partial glaze, fired in gas to roughly 1280 degrees, every form is opened and pulled until it can hold the weight of a name. The scarification you see is drawn from real, named sitters, pressed into the clay so that memory is not painted onto the surface but held within the form itself. These are not decorative pots. They are portraits. They are pleas made in earth. They are the shape of someone asked to remain in the world a little longer.

This work began in a season of return. After time away, I came back to the wheel the way clay comes back to the hand, softened, reworked, made ready again. I had been thinking about renunciation, about what it means to let go without going numb, to release a thing and still love it fully. Refinement, I came to understand, was never the removal of what is broken in us. It is the slow patience of being centred, opened, and fired until what remains can finally hold something true. The clay does not resist this. It yields, it remembers the pressure of the hand, and it carries the mark long after the hand has lifted.

So these vessels are abiku made visible. They who leave. They who are marked. They who are called by name. They who return. Each one is a small argument against disappearance, a body that chose to stay and to hold. When you live with one of these pieces, you are keeping company with a spirit that was asked, gently and seriously, to remain.