For most people, ceramics, whether they are pieces of pottery or delicate China, are meant to be held with caution, lest they fall and shatter into a million little pieces, losing their functionality, value, and beauty. But for London-based Dutch artist, Bouke de Vries, the beauty lies in this fracture. With his new installation Memory Vessels at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Kasturba Road, he does not attempt to put pieces back together to recreate what the ceramic once was, but eulogises them in tall glass urns that surround anyone who walks in, as if he has gathered up their brokenness and brought out their jagged beauty, nudging the viewer to notice it too.
The installation is part of de Vries’ ongoing project of the same name, exhibited in galleries across the world, using ceramics of different styles and histories. For each work, he finds broken pieces that fascinate him and encases them in glass replicas of the original object. This fascination with repair and preserving memory can be traced back to de Vries’ time spent working as a conservator. “Once, I restored a beautiful 2,000-year-old Roman glass urn, which would have been for cremation ashes. Later, I thought, what if you apply a cremation urn to an object – a ceramic vase itself? I put the fragments inside and then, the glass is a memory of its past,” he says.
However, like memories themselves, the shards are not neatly contained within the glass but sit like spikes upon it, lay scattered around it, and in one work, the glass is shattered, exposing the mass of pottery underneath. De Vries explains, “Some of the glass had cracks but rather than discarding it, I tried to find a way to incorporate them using the Japanese gold repair technique of Kintsugi. The damage is part of history and rather than trying to hide it, you accentuate the repair. Which, for me, is a really beautiful thought. That’s why I work with broken things. Just because something is broken doesn’t mean that it’s not beautiful anymore.”
For the installation at MAP, at the suggestion of its founder Abhishek Poddar, de Vries chose to use approximately 3-4 feet tall earthen jars used for trade between India and other South Asian countries, a scale he hasn’t worked with before. “I initially said it’s really difficult because they can’t make glass that big here in the UK. And he said, ‘We can in India’! It was a magical opportunity to expand what I’m doing. And so, we also decided to use food storage jars that were traded between India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, and encase them in glass made in Bengaluru,” he says, adding, “It is a different way of working for me, because I usually do everything myself. It was an amazing surprise to work with other creators that helped me with achieving something.”