Grief and Ceramics: Lydia's Artist Thesis

My work is a chronological series of ceramic vessels depicting my experiences with grief and loss within the last five years. Each piece reflects a period of my life and how the grief from that period impacted me over time. My relationship with my creator, God, has impacted how I experience grief. Each piece in the series makes visible the feelings that come with experiencing grief and brings them to life. In this series, I create physical representations of significant events in my life, such as intimacy with another person, creative energy, or the life of a loved one. and then break and destroy each vessel in a way that reflects the grief that I felt in the initial moment of loss. I demonstrate how something is still beautiful and of value even when it is broken. This project encounters beauty from brokenness and healing from what seems dead and gone. Just because something has been broken does not mean it no longer has value. Each object can be repaired to an even better quality than before.

I have come to find that it is impossible to live a fulfilling life without experiencing loss and pain. As time continues, I grow from the pain, heal from the brokenness, and become a stronger person. When I experienced the loss of my paternal grandfather, I felt as though his life ended abruptly when he still had so much life to live. When I went to create this moment of loss in the series, I created a tree that was snapped off at the base the way my grandfather’s life was suddenly cut off.

As I spent time with God through reading, praying, and observing nature, I came to understand that even though my grandfather’s physical body is slowly decaying under the earth, he has taken up his spiritual body in heaven and he is stronger than he ever was on earth. I am stronger for experiencing this, because it reminded me to be thankful for the time that I had with my grandfather and that I will one day see him again. I may not be able to talk to my grandfather anymore, but I can still remember the times that I did have with him and remember the emotions tied to those memories.

Grief is not something that only impacts me in the moment, but it stays with me over time until I have grown from it. To show this, there are pieces seen intermittently in the series that reflect my soul. These vessels also have the same damage that has been done to the other work. This is to show how I not only experienced grief in the initial moment of loss but how it also impacted me long term and how I healed from it. Some pieces in the series were hit with a wooden bat, cracked open with a hammer, dropped, or even ripped apart. This vessel is an angled geometric shape that reflects the basic shape of my female body. The base is small and narrow, but as it goes up in height it widens and then comes back in at a sharp angle to reflect my knees and waist. The shape then repeats itself as it goes further up to reflect my chest and neck. The first time that the vessel is seen there is no damage to it, yet the form is incomplete. Every time that the vessel is seen in the progression, there is a new height added to the form to reflect my growth as a person. The fourth and final time that it is encountered the form is completed and there has been healing to most of the old damage, but there is still new damage since the last time it was encountered. This is to show that although I have grown significantly in my faith and healed from much of my grief in the last five years, I am continually growing, changing, and healing. I believe that people are never done growing in who they are and that there will always be loss and grief, but healing comes with time and growth.

When I first started working in clay, I quickly found that throwing on the potter’s wheel helped me center my mind. By focusing on the spinning wheel, it allowed me to focus on the clay in front of me and think about one thing at a time. This helped me to process my thoughts and emotions slowly and thoughtfully. These reflections are exhibited in the forms of the vessels, times of sadness my pots are low and wide. In times of anxiety my work is tall and winding—usually falling over before being finished. In this body of work, I am focusing my emotions around experiences of grief by using clay to make both thrown and sculpted vessels. These vessels are representative of loss, hurt, anger, disgust, and even feelings of betrayal. I use the vessels as a way to evoke emotion in the viewer similar to the ways of Vincent van Gogh.

Viewing The Starry Night in New York left me in tears because of its overwhelming beauty and it begged me to come closer to investigate and see more detail and intricacy. I could hear the crickets in the field, I could see the stars shining in the night sky, and I could feel the cool breeze on my face. Van Gogh’s work is not just something to pass by and forget about; instead, it causes me to stop, investigate, and feel. His use of line, motion, and color depicts the simple yet ornate beauty of what he saw. I realized then that Van Gogh strived to show people the beauty that could be found in the mundane. His work inspires me to use ceramics to reflect the beauty that I see in both God’s creation and in my experiences of grief. I evoke emotion in the viewers and beg them to come closer to investigate because there is something unusual and eye-catching about the work. My series takes things that are commonly seen on display in an art gallery, such as a nude body, a tree, or a human face, and distorts them in a way that is unusual. By putting broken things on display I catch the viewers’ attention and invite them to look closer at the work. It is not unusual to see a sculpture of a brain on display, but it is unusual to display a brain that is picked apart and has holes all over it. This causes people to stop and investigate the work further and try to understand how and why each of the pieces are broken.

My making process begins by reflecting back on emotional memories in my life that stand out to me and then trying to understand them. By understanding my emotions and the emotions of others, I am able to understand the basic thing that sets humans apart from the rest of creation. “By nature, human beings are first and foremost emotional creatures. We are motivated and activated by emotions,” (Trettenero). Our emotions influence our attitudes, choices, actions, and reactions (Hwang and Matsumoto). My emotions in times of loss have been influenced by my faith in God and understanding of his creation as broken yet beautiful.

Understanding my emotions about grief and loss activates spiritual and emotional growth. Growth comes from time of reflection and intimacy with my creator, God. I believe I was created by a creative God who, “knit me together in my mother’s womb. I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” (Thompson Chain-Reference Bible: New International Version, Psalms. 139.13.14). He created me with emotion, beauty, and detail that I am just beginning to understand. I attempt to encapsulate a fraction of the beauty and detail of God’s creation back into my work by evoking an emotional reaction to brokenness and regrowth seen in my vessels.

God[1] created me, and He knows every part of me (Psalms. 139). In one piece of the series, I created a cylinder with the entryways of four different homes from my past. One side is brick, another side has siding on it, another side tree bark texturing on it, and the last side has tall pillars and doors. This piece shows how God gave me multiple places to call home over the years but none of them were meant to last forever. Every time I moved, I had to grieve the loss of the house because it was the place I felt safest. Yet, God was there in that moment with me, and He felt all of my emotions with me. Once created, I break down the piece and take advantage of the plasticity of the clay, like the plasticity of my soul. Much like the clay forms, my soul gets beaten down, torn, ripped, and broken. Yet, my soul still manages to grow back and evolve when I engage with my creator for healing or forgiveness.

Much like techniques of kintsugi, my work emphasizes growth through brokenness and recovery. It uses the brokenness to become stronger and more beautiful than it originally was. Kintsugi takes something that is seen as too broken to ever be used again and makes it stronger and more beautiful than it was before. In this series the vessel that is seen intermittently with new damage, height, and growth serves to reflect this idea and it serves as a reminder that sometimes I need to be broken down to become better. God has shown me forgiveness, graciousness, and mercy. He has broken me down from my sin the way a potter puts a malformed vessel into the reclaim bucket to become a lump of clay. He then picks me up out of the reclaim bucket and shapes me into a new vessel that is better than before. My work shows how I live a life that is full of grief and brokenness but is repaired by God in a way that makes me better for experiencing the grief.

Works Cited

Hwang, Hyisung, and David Matsumoto. “Functions of Emotions.” Noba, San Francisco State University, 2021, nobaproject.com/modules/functions-of-emotions.

Thompson Chain-Reference Bible. New International Version ed., THE B. B. KIRKBRIDE BIBLE COMPANY, INC., 2012.

Trettenero, Scott. “Human Beings Are First and Foremost Emotional Creatures.” Psychreg, 18 July 2020, www.psychreg.org/human-beings-are-emotional-creatures/.

Van Gogh, Vincent Willem. The Starry Night . 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

"SOUL"

This piece is the beginning of my soul. The form is incomplete, but there is not any damage done to it yet. This is to show that although my soul was incomplete, it was not yet harmed by grief and loss.

"Grandpa Jack"

I lost my grandfather in the Fall of my senior year of high school. He had been struggling with dementia for many years. Although he passed on September 1, 2017 it felt like I was slowly losing him for a long time. Every time I saw him there was less and less of him there. The last time I ever spoke to him he called me by the wrong name. That night I layed in bed and cried. I knew it wouldn’t be long, but I couldn’t understand why he had to suffer like this. I didn’t understand why God allowed it that I only ever remembered my grandfather while he had dementia. For This moment of grief I sculpted my grandfather's brain and slowly picked it apart to show the way that I slowly lost him.

"Situationship"

Like every other high school girl, there was a guy that I really liked. We spent hours together, talked about everything, and it felt like we were actually in a relationship. Only thing was that he wasn’t a christian and had no intention of becoming a christian. I knew that it would never work between us, but still I didn’t want to give him up. We were in a “situationship” if you will. One day he told me that there was a girl he liked and that he asked her out. I felt dropped, kicked to the side, and put in the corner. I was traded in for something better, someone that would give him a real relationship. To show this I sculpted us holding hands, the way that we often did, and then I dropped them the way that I felt that I had been dropped.

"Freshman Year"

My freshman year of college I came in with zero friends and only wanted to fit in with those around me. Therefore, I made fast friends with the people who lived with me on the floor of my residence hall. At first everything seemed great. We talked about fun things, played games, went on Walmart adventures, etc. but things changed when I started to find my identity in this group of people and allowed myself to say and do things that I would never otherwise deem appropriate. This came to light and I quickly was separated from all of these people and asked not to speak to them. It felt like the sweet aroma of friendship had wilted and decayed. I represented this moment of loss by making a vase of beautiful flowers that have wilted, died, and decayed much the way that the community of friends did.

"SOUL"

This piece is a continuation of the first part of my soul. New height has been added, but there has also been damage done to it. This is the same damage that has also been done in the previous three pieces. The first damage is the picking apart the same way that the brain was picked apart. Losing my grandfather stuck with me for a long time and it felt like there were holes in me. I could at times feel his presence, but not for very long. This loss caused me to go into a deep depression that was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

This piece has also been dropped the same way that I felt I had been dropped by the situationship during my senior year of high school. Losing that friendship caused me to stay very angry for a very long time. Although our friendship was over, the damage was still eating away at me. I wasn’t sure that I would ever recover.

This Piece was also wilted the same way that the flowers in the vase were wilted. The isolation that came from losing those friends caused me to question my worth and my values. I wasn’t acting like the person of strong morals and character that I was raised to be and I was disappointed by this. Instead of the beautiful aroma of Christ being emitted, I was emitting a stale and spiritually dead aroma and nobody wanted to be around that.

"Emily"

When I came home from my freshman year of college I was eager to see my highschool friends again. The difficulty was that my long time friend Emily was becoming a different person altogether. She would tell us what we could and couldn’t do, she would tell us endless lies, gaslight us, favor one person while gossiping about another. I never knew what side of Emily I was getting from one moment to the next. When my friend Katie and I decided to stop being friends with Emily it was very difficult to do. This was someone that we had known for years and loved, but she was not good to us. Even after the friendship ended Emily would continue to tell lies about us and manipulate some of our friends. To show how this impacted me I decided to sculpt Emily’s face and then break it open with a hammer. This was to show how we thought we knew who Emily really was, but in the end it was all lies and manipulation and we never actually knew Emily.

"Isaiah"

During my sophomore year of college I was beginning to hang out more with a friend named Isaiah. We enjoyed long talks about philosophy and about spiritual growth. We had confided in each other more than typical friends would. During spring break we were on a trip together where we talked even more and we both had developed feelings for each other. I had never been in a relationship before, but it felt like it was finally going to happen for me. Things were going great on the trip until one night he told me that he liked me and wanted a relationship with me, but didn’t think it was the right time. My heart was crushed. I felt like he had carelessly trampled over something delicate. We had an intimacy that developed from vulnerability with each other, and it was gone in an instant. To show this, I decided to make a wine bottle and wine goblets. Sharing a bottle of wine with another person is intimate and the bottle and goblets are fragile. Therefore, to show the gravity of the situation I decided to knock over the wine bottle and goblets causing them to break the way that it seems the intimacy and vulnerability were clumsily trampled on.

"Ceramics"

In the spring of my sophomore year I was in my second semester of ceramics and had signed up to do a ceramics apprenticeship for the summer. My life was looking up, until the Covid-19 pandemic shut everything down and sent me home from school for several months. In that time at home I lost all creative energy and became incredibly depressed. When I got the news that my internship was also cancelled It felt as though someone had hit me in the gut with a baseball bat. There was nothing left in me. To represent this moment of loss I created an old bottle kiln, like the ones used in the twentieth century, I then hit the kiln with a wooden bat the same way I felt hit in the gut.

"SOUL"

In this piece, there is once again new height that has been added, healing over some of the old damage, but there is also new damage. The first thing that is seen is that there is a portion missing out of the top of the piece and shards on the ground. This is reflective of how I felt shattered when I lost my friendship with Emily. It felt like something was broken inside of me. I became wary of everyone and anxious whenever I saw someone who looked like her. I constantly had flashbacks and dreams of her yelling at me again and telling me all over again how terrible of a person I was.

On another side of the piece there is a place where the piece has been dropped again. This shows the grief I experienced with Isaiah and it mirrors the way that I felt clumsily knocked over. After this happened I thought that there was something wrong with me and that I would never find the person that was meant for me. I had just lost not only an opportunity to find a spouse, but also a friend.

This piece has also been hit with a wooden bat the same way that the bottle kiln was. When the pandemic took over I felt as if someone had walked up to me and hit me in the gut with a wooden bat. I lost all creative energy and felt as if my journey with ceramics had come to an end. I didn’t know where I was going to go from there if I had no energy or inspiration. I spent many months trying to figure out where to go from there.

In other areas of the piece there is healing done to damage that was initially done to the last piece. Where there were large holes picked away, smaller holes remain. This shows how I slowly was coming to accept the circumstances of my grandfather’s life and death. I was slowly choosing to come to know who he was both before and during the time that I knew him. In the area where it was dropped, it is now slightly less flattened, but still clearly damaged.

A few months after I graduated high school in 2018 I had a dream where Dustin and I were at a table chatting as friends again without any animosity for the past. When I woke up the next morning I realized that I just wanted my friend back and that in order for that to happen I had to apologize and try to fix things with him. When I tried to do this he blocked me on every platform and refused to speak to me. He wanted nothing to do with me and I had to live with the guilt of what I had done to him out of anger and how we had both hurt each other. I knew I was forgiven by God, but I still thought of Dustin daily and wondered how he was doing, if he was happy, or if he would ever think about possibly forgiving me. I was simply haunted. The area that was wilted is now far less wilted and has the buddings of red peonies. After I moved out of the dorms for the summer I began to allow God to smooth my pain and to teach me his love for me even though I had messed up so badly. New growth was emerging out of something I wanted to run and hide from.

"Home"

During the fall of 2020 my parents suddenly moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. It would be the fourth time I had moved, and this time I was in college. It felt like I was having my home ripped away from me and I didn’t know where I belonged anymore. I didn’t know what to say when people asked me where I was from. For this piece I decided to create four places I have felt at home on to one cylinder. I then proceeded to rip away at the walls of the cylinder to show the way it felt as though home had been ripped away from me when I had to move again.

"Grandpa Wesley"

While my family was moving in 2020 my grandfather passed away suddenly from a brain bleed. Although he had a brain bleed in 2016 as well, I never thought that I would lose him. I always saw my grandfather as strong and rooted in his faith, so when I lost him it felt as though a storm had come and a tall strong tree had been snapped at the base. It didn’t make sense that something so strong could decay and break down the way that it did. Losing my grandfather reminded me of the fragility of even the strongest people.

"Body Image"

During the summer of 2021 I was living alone in Kirksville and working 40 hours a week at a job I hated. I had minimal social interaction and spent most of my time at home alone. I quickly became depressed and unsatisfied with my life. I was tired of not being able to see my family or friends, I was tired of my job, and I began to grow a contempt for my body. I hated the way it looked, the way it worked, the way I was too big in all the wrong places, and I hated that my body didn’t look like the body I wanted. The contempt I had for my body only grew over time and made things worse. The mindset that I had was blown out of proportion and tearing me apart. I couldn’t look in the mirror without hating what I saw. My body did not feel my own. To show this slow loss of appreciation for my body I sculpted my own body. This intimate process forced me to examine and appreciate every fold and crease of my skin. To show the way that hating my body impacted me I blew air into the neck of the vessel, which formed rips in the body as if my body was being ripped open and blown out of proportion.

"SOUL"

This is the fourth and final piece that represents my soul. The form has been greatly refined and shaped into a form reflecting the basic outline of the human body.

Towards the top of the piece, it is ripped away leaving a large hole. This shows how having to move caused me to feel as if home had been ripped away from me. Even now it is still difficult for me to know what to say when someone asks me where I am from. There is nowhere that truly feels like home, and I know that it will be a long time before I feel a sense of home again.

The neck is jagged the way that tree seen earlier is jagged and snapped off. Losing my grandfather felt like a storm that had come out of nowhere and broken down the strongest person I knew. I still mourn this loss, but I am comforted knowing that he is no longer in pain and is singing with Jesus in heaven. I still struggle to understand why things happened the way they did, but if it taught me anything, losing my grandfather reminded me of God’s grace and mercy.

There are also areas of the piece that have been blown and ripped the same as my body. The contempt that I had for my body changed something inside of me. I wasn’t the person I once was, and I didn’t like or recognize the person that I saw in the mirror. I am now working harder than ever to accept and love my body as it is. I only get one body and I don’t want to waste it away with contempt and hatred.

Down below, there are now only faint scratch marks and small dents where there once were holes. In the four years since the passing of my grandfather I have come to accept this loss and remember the joyful times that we did have together instead of ruminating only on the fact that I only ever knew him when he was sick. This has caused me to be present in every moment and not to wish for a moment to pass simply because it is difficult. Instead, dig in and get to the source of why something is difficult and try to understand it.

Where there was a large dent from being dropped by Dustin, there is now a lace imprinted pocket that stands to show complete regrowth. This semester while I was working on this project, Dustin suddenly reached out to me and gave me his forgiveness. Our friendship has regrown and is healthier than it ever was before. He has since become a christian and there has been tremendous regrowth and recovery to the damage that was once done. Having this happen felt like I was finally able to clean out an old, infected wound and have some closure to something that had been haunting me for four years.

The area that once was wilted, is now covered in big peony blossoms. This shows the spiritual growth that has occured since my freshman year. I was reminded of the fact that God loves me the same no matter what I do or how badly I mess up. Learning this has allowed me to lend grace to others even when they don’t deserve it and to love others when it seems that they have done something unforgivable.

As for the area that was shattered, it has now had the pieces picked up and begun to be glued back together using the ancient technique of Kintsugi. This is not to say that my friendship with Emily has been mended. Instead, it is to show the personal growth I have gone through to learn to trust others again and not to be afraid of who a person could be. I have learned not to put up with people who are continually hurting me without any remorse and only looking for self-gain. This is not to say that these people don’t deserve love, but rather that I am learning to set healthy boundaries for myself and to say “no” when these people try to control me.

Where the second dent occurred, it is slightly less dented. I have come to understand that I will still find a partner, but that it may not be for a long time. Boys are dumb, but that doesn’t mean that they are always looking to break a heart. Although my friendship with Isaiah will never be what it once was, we have been able to move past the hurt that we caused one another and work together peaceably.

The area that was hit with a wooden bat is still dented, but less so. I have since rekindled my passion for ceramics, but it is a struggle to figure out how to make it long term in the world of ceramics and I fear that one day I will get up from the potter’s wheel never to return.

Grief and Ceramics: Lydia's Artist Thesis

"SOUL"

"Grandpa Jack"

"Situationship"

"Freshman Year"

"SOUL"

"Emily"

"Isaiah"

"Ceramics"

"SOUL"

"Home"

"Grandpa Wesley"

"Body Image"

"SOUL"

Pottery by Lydia