DA-SEIN

The MFA Thesis Project, DA-SEIN [there-being], explores the vessel as a conceptual container, through which ideas of the self or lived experience become tangible. At the center of the project is my 'lived experience' as a woman, a single mother, a human being, as connected to phenomenology and feminist research inquiries. The terms ‘lived experience’ and ‘container’ are foundationally drawn from Ursula Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” My MFA project includes four distinct works exhibited in conversation with each other. The metaphoric and metamorphic cocoon-like structures in the piece Hüllen [hulls] are the focal point of the exhibition. They not only intend to hold the protective spaces of the transformative possibilities of female lives, but also ambiguously, they intend to represent roles and responsibilities of holding space, or in other words, care giving. The sculptural vessels honor the invisible acts of caring, which sometimes compete with transformational potentials and fleeting time. This story of existence in the works Hüllen is supported by additional works: ad infinitum; the presence of essence— inversion of space; and [stela]. This feminist, practice-based research project was mainly influenced by the history of ceramics as a cultural inheritance and qualities innate in clay as a material, as well as ideas of containment as discussed in Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”