VESSELS: The Worlds We Carry

Every figure in VESSELS has her eyes closed. That’s the first thing I want you to notice, because it’s the whole point. They aren’t looking out at the world - they’re looking in. Where it came from For centuries, artists have imagined the body as a container for something hidden. Medieval sculptors carved the Vierge ouvrante, a Virgin whose wooden body swings open like a cabinet to reveal entire painted worlds inside her. In 18th-century Florence, anatomists made the Anatomical Venus: life-size wax women in pearls, reclining on silk, whose torsos lift away to show what’s underneath. In 1936, Dalí fitted the Venus de Milo with drawers, the secret compartments he believed every psyche keeps locked. Bosch painted his Garden of Earthly Delights as a triptych that sits closed, grey and silent until you open it and a whole teeming universe spills out. I kept returning to that gesture: the opening. The moment the outside gives way and you see what someone is really carrying. What the vessels hold My work has always been about internal worlds, and about the conflict of living right now. We’re caught between looking backward and looking forward: nostalgic for pasts we never lived, anxious about futures that feel like they’re arriving too fast. Climate, war, machines, money. The existential threats don’t stay outside us. We absorb them. We carry them around inside our bodies like weather. So each figure in VESSELS is painted in the language of the past, classical oil and old-master light, and each one opens onto a world that belongs to now or next. That’s how it feels to be a person right now. There’s a kind of knowledge only we have about ourselves: the unknowable known. You can’t explain it to anyone else, you can’t prove it, but you feel it physically. The windows in these bodies are my attempt to show it. Multiverses and hyperstition Two ideas run underneath all my work. The first is the multiverse, or what I think of as multiverse-ality. Every one of us holds parallel worlds: the life we’re living, the lives we didn’t choose, the futures we keep rehearsing in our heads. Each vessel is a single body containing a whole other reality, stacked inside this one. The second is hyperstition: fictions that make themselves real by being believed in. The future isn’t only something that happens to us. It’s something we imagine, repeat and share until it hardens into fact. The worlds inside these figures, the neon cities, the gambling, the endless office, the war, aren’t just reflections. They’re the stories we’re telling ourselves about where we’re going. And the stories we carry long enough tend to come true. So VESSELS asks a simple question: what are you carrying, and what will it become? VESSELS sits as both a 1/1 collection on Superrare and the editions collection on TransientLabs.