Ella Berry

Where the Light Enters

In the past few years, a lot of question have come up within myself- questions about our interior world, our surface, and how they interact with each other and the outside world. Even while we are at the eye of the storm, life and the world push us to keep on keeping on- but strong inside instincts are signaling us to stop. I ask to stay in that moment- of the dissonance that often leads to the breaking point. In my Senior Project I created a family of wheel thrown porcelain vases. The contain the air, and almost stop it from leaving- while it struggles to find an escape route. The meeting point of the inner and outer forces of the vase lead to a crack, a ceramic "Trojan horse". I combined a traditional technique of wheelwork, with a new technique of my own invention- which creates the cracks on the surface of the vase. On the vases I paint details from my own life- refined but anonymous. The cracks and paintings are an invitation for a dialogue between those and the viewer, between the viewer and themselves. I ask to reexamine the terms on which we view a vessel, and ourselves as "whole".