A Blue Offering for Home

Medium: Slip-cast white earthenware ceramic
Dimensions: 12” x 7“ x 7”
Year: 2026

This vessel brings together several histories of ornament, trade, and cultural exchange. Its silhouette draws from East Asian ceramic traditions, while the dense floral embellishment and theatrical excess recall the opulence of French Rococo decorative arts.

The deep blue shifts those references toward Haiti. It evokes indigo, a crop deeply tied to the island’s colonial history, while also calling to mind the Caribbean Sea, sky, memory, and diaspora. Against that history, ornament becomes more than decoration. It becomes a language of survival, adaptation, and reclamation.

The vessel holds these influences in tension: European luxury, Asian form, Caribbean color, and Haitian memory. What appears lavish on the surface also carries the weight of migration, colonial exchange, and the ways objects move across cultures, changing meaning as they travel.
_
Artwork funded by a grant from the Corral and Cathers Professional Artist Fund at the Coral Gables Community Foundation.