Bounds
Acrylic on unglazed ceramic.
Installation from (5) Take my Hand - Held Meanings
(Below, you can find the incantations translated into English if you are curious to read them.)
I began inventing my own alphabets as a child and teenager, as a way of protecting my thoughts from being read by people who might not treat them with care. In these bowls, I return to that private practice of protection, transforming it into an artistic and political language.
I made these incantation bowls with respect and love for the people who will inhabit the gallery space. During the project, I created an alphabet of protection through which the spells are written. The incantations are fully functional because their intention holds. They remain visible, but they are not immediately available to every gaze. Writing becomes pattern, boundary, and protective architecture. The alphabet holds space for privacy, opacity, and the right not to be fully legible, while the English translations offer another way of entering the work for those who choose to do so.
Incantation bowls are protective objects known especially from late antique Mesopotamia. Their interiors were often covered with spiralling texts intended to confront, bind, or contain harmful forces. Some were placed upside down near thresholds or around the boundaries of homes, creating forms of protection for the people living within them.
Rather than reconstructing historical examples, my practice enters into dialogue with their histories. Clay, inscription, intention, and the act of making come together in a spiral of affects and effects, turning the hollow of each vessel into a space where harm is brought to its limits, so that our needs and dreams for other realities can move outward into the room.
Bowl 1, The Transphobia Monster & the Binary Evil Spirits
I name your hunger, your tricks, your despair. I, by these lines, seize you here. You feast on fear of the ambiguous, on moral panic, on shame. You feed on cruelty masked as humour, on control and power pretending to be care. You thrive when life is forced into either-or, when complexity is branded a threat. You dance to the clicking of locks on bodies, to misnaming, to erasure. You flourish in violence, threats, and scapegoats, whispering behind our beds, Your hair is perfumed, yet it reeks of spite.
Your breaths sharpen brutality, calling it nature, reason or faith. This room does not consent to you. This circle grants you no passage. Neither your authority is validated. Here, you have been named. Your disguise is taken away. Read into this spiral. In this vessel you are held. Transphobia Monster and Binary Evil Spirits, your lies are contained. Border-makers, Binary Wardens, Here you will remain. Your gates unhinge. Your cages forget their shape. Your locks unlearn your hands, your keys turn to sand, and your poison evaporates. Will you not pass this threshold. Will you not leave this clay. May names remain in the hands of the named. May every person be spoken into safety, in their own true words. May dignity return to the skin, and softness return to our naming. May self-definition be a right, and kinship grow untamed. May joy be the sound of the world. May our bodies be homes, not debates, not weapons. May the room remember empathy. May the hearts remember ease. So it is kept. So it is sealed.
Bowl 2, The Extractor Fever
Extractor Fever, devourer of hours, never-ending hunger, profit malady, I name you.
I see you moving from hand to hand, from law to invoice, from field to market, from wound to word. I call you into this bowl. Out of the bodies, out of the souls, out of the river, out of the dreams, out of these walls. I call you into this bowl. Into this hollow. Here, you will keep spinning in your own . You who measure hours as gold, and turn gold into your teeth, you who call separation growth and living production. You who feed from others’ hands and leave them empty. You who sneak back for the gloves, then keep chewing: fingers, wrists, flesh, skin. You who grind the bone and call the powder profit. You who name and claim the ruins your shadow leaves. You who deny even the soil under our steps
or above our graves. Listen. You cannot return the hours. You cannot unbite the hand.You cannot ungrind the bone. You cannot unruin the land. You cannot make the waters forget. You cannot make the soil unsee. So bring repair. Let the hands be strong and free to play, to make, to feed. Let the backs you bent rest and be sheltered. Let the rivers keep their course. Let the sea dance and recover. Let the forests keep their breath. Let the deserts remain desert,
not assets, not yoked, not waiting to be renamed. Let the soil have time for root, worm, seed, and fruit. Let the dead have their names and let their stories be sung.
What cannot be returned must be repaired. What cannot be repaired must be witnessed. What has been witnessed
must not be taken again. Stay bound here, where the circle does not feed you. Stay named here where your teeth cannot multiply.
Bowl 3, Sorting Wind
Sorting Wind, counterfeit weather, carrier of outrage, split-tongued current, I hear you. You enter through the smallest openings,
through the unfinished sentence, through the silences, through glass ceilings and sliding doors. You lift one word and bury all the others. You feed on humiliation. You blow suspicion between neighbours. You turn the familiar into a threat, the stranger into a warning,
the wounded into rival wounds. You sort us into names too small to hold us. You draw a line through the room and whisper: Choose. Condemn. Prove you are not the mistake. You call complexity betrayal. You call doubt weakness. You call listening surrender. You call the unfamiliar an enemy. Sorting Wind, I call you down. Out of the mouth. Out of the screen. Out of the crowd. Out of the space between us. Enter this bowl, where there is no sky for you to spread. Here your rumours lose their wings. Here the maps you carry lose their borders, and their ink fades. Sorting wind, Spin here until every accusation falls back into question. Until differences remain differences,
not weapons. Until anger remembers its source and refuses the nearest target. Until our struggles recognise one another without becoming the same. Sorting Wind, you are confined here. May no one disappear for harmony. May no one be abandoned for not fitting a shape that cannot hold them. May the room breathe together without becoming a single breath. So it is read. So it is sealed.
Bowl 4 - Numbing Fog
Numbing Fog, grey spell, soft eater of feeling, I know your ways. You enter through endless images, through grief too large to bear, through the voice that says nothing matters, don ́t try, you will fail. You blur faces into numbers, turning pain into a never-ending rain, neighbours into distant echoes, burying our will in thick air. May hearts open again on their own terms. Because Numbing Fog,
You will not dwell there. Come into this bowl. Thin here. Lose your hold. Settle here. Let feelings return without drowning. Let actions return without saviourhood. Let boundaries guard tenderness. Let care move without burning. May the soul breathe. May the body answer. May rest and response coexist. Let meaning return. Let energy follow. So it is held. So it is sealed
Bowl 5 - Paper-Teeth Spirit
Paper-Teeth Spirit, clerk of borders, keeper of numbered doors, mouth made of forms, I name you.
You hide in passive sentences, behind stamps, screens, signatures, missing attachments, unanswered calls, impossible deadlines. You turn people into files, a life into a case, a wound into evidence, a need into eligibility. You make paper heavier than bodies,
only to bury them beneath it and forget them. Paper-Teeth Spirit, open your mouth. The cuts you made will no longer bleed. I pull your teeth one by one. With each word, your bite is undone. Let this rim be your muzzle. Let this circle be your bin.Come into this bowl. Not into the waiting room. Not into the home. Your stamps turn blank. Your boxes lose their walls. Your files release the names they swallowed and erased. Stay in this vessel, where your rules only measure themselves. Paper-Teeth Spirit, you will remain here, consuming your own pages in this bowl, here your ink cannot command, where your stamps carry no sentence. May systems answer
for the harm they cause. May doors open by life and justice, not by luck. Paper-Teeth Spirit, here your fangs disappear. So it is written. So it is sealed.
