Beautiful Struggle: Honesty

Harumo Sato

Acrylic, oil pastel on pot

Part of "Beautiful Struggle" Site Specific Installation

12" x 12" x 13"

2021

 Vessel of Life

“Vessel of life” is a series of hope I cast for the future, respecting and worshiping nature.

Historically, pots are treated as a way to store something important, like food and water. In prehistoric Japan, diverse hunter-gatherer people, called Jomon lived between 14,000-300BCE, used to make a lot of intricate dynamic unglazed clay pots. Some of their pots have faces on the surface of pots. Some even have a female face and a baby coming out from her vergina. I observed their simple, but elegant meaning of the pot: vessel of life. Mainly, Jomon people used their pots for cooking and storing food. The pots improved their digestion ability, variety of food they consumed, and reduced time for preparing meals. It was a magical tool to sustain their lives.

Nowadays, we rarely use unglazed terracotta clay pots for cooking but for gardening as a planter. It still serves as a vessel of life, storing plants which are crucial for any living creatures on the Earth. By drawing on terracotta pots, I traced Jomon mentality and hope to increase more affection toward nature including house plants.