Vessels
I believe we come into this world as empty vessels.
Not just in knowledge and experience, but also emotionally.
Our cup is yet to be filled and our perspectives of the world yet to be colored.
And then it happens.
Something painful. Something wrong. Some traumatic event that jars us from our lightness.
It dumps itself into our empty vessel like a heavy weight.
Life isn’t always kind to us. We all experience grief and hardship. One by one they fill up the vessel that was once so free and expansive. Trapped inside of us.
Ignored, all the feelings and emotions around these events fester and multiply inside of us. Brimming with darkness they start to cause damage to our entire system. I think this is where anxiety and depression come from a lot of times. It’s a vessel that is in need of a deep purging, stuck inside the system of a person who doesn’t know how to do that.
Now, what does this have to do with art?
Oftentimes, everything.
For me, my art is a way to clear out the vessel. I have found that in the times of my life when things were the most stressful and traumatic, I was the most prolific.
Unable to do anything about the circumstances that surrounded me, I turned to creation.
There is something deeply meditative about creating art. Time stops and the world seems to melt away. There is something tremendously healing for humans about the process of creation. It’s a way of communicating without words. Sometimes, when we experience something truly traumatic, we lack the words to describe the emotions around it. We can’t empty the vessel telling someone about what’s inside because we simply haven’t created the language that describes it.
We can express it through art.
Now, that’s not to say that the feelings become art. It’s not always a reflection of the feelings themselves. Perhaps it’s the state of creation that realigns us enough for the vessel to drain. Perhaps it soothes us enough for those feelings to safely pass through us.
I don’t know exactly how it works, but I know that when my studio is getting more and more full of pieces my vessel, in turn, is getting less and less full.
It’s not just an imagined or experienced phenomenon. It’s physical.
There was a 2014 study that put participants in an fMRI machine. Half of them had been through a 10-week art intervention, half had not. The results showed a marked physical improvement in the areas of the brain associated with stress management and resilience.
We undervalue the strength required to survive emotional pain. It’s easier to let your vessel accumulate, but it robs you of your joy. Making art can be a shortcut to returning to the lightness we began with. Surrounded by beautiful mementos of an emotional journey back to yourself.
Perhaps this is why we also experience that indescribable feeling as we experience art.
Feelings, that we lack the words to describe, show up mirrored to us in a piece of art.
Have you had that feeling of standing in front of a work of art and just knowing?
Just knowing that there was a shared feeling between you and its creator. A feeling that perhaps neither of you would be able to articulate. But through the expression of the artist, and the consumption of the viewer, a conversation takes place that transcends words.
And through that unspoken communication, both vessels get filled with something less heavy and dark than the pain that might have filled them before.
Connection.
