top row, l-r: epoxy resin (cast copy of a wedgewood cup); anodised aluminium (lathe turned); epoxy resin (poured into a constructed mould made from plastic sheet and sticky tape).
middle row, l-r: found wooden bowl (partially saw cut and painted); epoxy resin (poured into a plastic cup), paulonia offcut (chinese tree).
bottom row, l-r: english ash (lathe turned and constructed copy of a ceramic jug); cast 925 silver (cast from wax and plastic spoons); epoxy resin (cast copy of a ramekin).
 

Sally Marsland's 2001 exhibition at Gallery Funaki was all Almost Black ; this one was all colours. The black works were a demonstration of multiple blacks through different materials; this one too was a demonstration of multiplicity. And although different materials once again made their way through these works, this time, the vessel was the form that carried the variety. Further, it allows another kind of multiplicity to be exhibited in which the vessel appeared, disappeared and then re-appeared through its contents.

As a form, type or object, the vessel seems relatively easy to describe in words. The Macquarie Dictionary defines it (in its second variant) as “a hollow or concave article, as a cup, bowl, pot, pitcher, vase, bottle etc., for holding liquid or other contents” (The other variants – marine, medical, botanical and biblical – can be set aside here). Note how the definition quickly goes to examples. To be legible, the definition appeals to the tangible; and I would suggest, for a proper understanding of “vessel”, you have to – literally - go tangible.

As words deal with classes of things, any specific vessel has to be described using many words, so that what is apparent in its material state is apparent in the description. Matter (and form) has the reverse problem: it has too many qualities. If groups of objects are taken through sets of forms and materials, each object is rendered complex through the comparison, sometimes as part of a subset, sometimes as an individual thing. This is the arena in which Marsland's works play.

For why are you like this… , Marsland placed groups of vessels along the gallery's three benches so that you could see them individually, in pairs, threes and fours, as three big groups and as one totality. Through the groupings ran other contrasting qualities: colours, materials, proportions, specific types, fabrication techniques and origins. To get a sense of the variety, here is every seventh vessel from Marsland's catalogue list: (1) a multiple-yellow polyurethane resin “bucket”; (7) a smooth leather-like blue epoxy resin “calix”; (14) a small black and blue polyurethane resin “glass”; (21) a tin can, covered in baked enamel; (28) a found wooden bowl with one end touched up in blue acrylic paint; (35) a jug made of stiffened layers of paint. Between these, there were silver, aluminium, tin and wood and ceramic vessels, both purpose-made and as found. Seeing them together, one could sense an invisible but tangible ur-vessel being formed, to which each object was related, no matter how eccentric or idiosyncratic it was.

And one could also sense a defining transformation spread across the objects. Some of the found vessels (the tins, aluminium bottles, wooden bowls) had a coating of paint put on them by the artist. Another work – made in 1999 by adding layer upon layer of paint over a wax cast of a jug, the wax then like contents being melted and poured away – gave these found painted vessels a specific reading: they were vessels where the contents were beginning to take over and become the object. Marsland's polyurethane casts took up this final position, where the contents of a vessel, once liquid and now solid, formed a new slightly smaller and faintly altered representation of that vessel . The casts were reminders that all vessels are temporary moulds, but were also reifications of an old argument in art: pure content seen one way, and pure form seen another way.

Although Marsland's paint and cast aluminium versions were also exhibited – the most rigorous, reduced and challenging resin work was item (33): a red/orange disc of epoxy resin. My guess is that it was cast on a round pizza tray. It had a smooth surface on its cast side (exhibited as its top) and a splotchy surface on the other (its casting top, but hidden). Almost just a sample of resin, the disc demanded to be read as a vessel in the context of this exhibition, with the realisation that in other company such as plates and mats, it would also belong with them. Or it could also belong to same family as the tiny flat blobs of resin in Marsland's necklaces which were distributed as a kind of footnote over the lower window bench in the gallery's street-front.