“If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought we had a mind” Richard Rorty (2008).
Anders Ruhwald’s third solo exhibition at Volume Gallery departs from the subversion of an essential archetype: the vessel. Through this act, he continues to mine the relationship between the body and the object with new works that converge around one of the central metaphorical expressions in ceramics, the vessel as a body.
In The Vessel is a Body is a Skull is a Mask, Ruhwald further explores the significance of the vessel through the lens of language. The Danish word for vessel, skål, is linguistically tied to the word skull originating in the Old Norse word skalli that means shell. In this triangle of words and meanings a relationship between body, surface, and container is established suggesting a representational conflation of external and internal experiences of the world.
Between two oversized and roughly shaped ears, the installation positions the viewer within a metaphorical vessel – the space inhabited by the mind. As the viewer becomes aware of their placement inside this figurative skull, the experience takes a metaphysical turn. Centrally placed in the gallery, large amorphous sculptures linger between bodily representation and abstraction as a large-scale perforated mass of material. The ten ceramic masks on stands – five with eye-like orifices, the others without – are silent onlookers returning the audience’s gaze. In this encounter between the observer and the observed, there is a layering of the consciousness that implicates the audience in the overall experience of the work.