Ceara Conway
''I especially like A Vessel For Souls, it’s very enriching as well as plain heart-warming'' - Alain De Button, 2016
''A Vessel for Souls'' explores the artists’ own mortality and the concept of time. These themes were discussed in a conversation between the artist and her mother where they contemplate their own death and the relationship between them.
This conversation was initiated through the artist planting a tree on her mother’s land so that one day she could build a boat from it, a 'soul boat''.
Ceara is interested in the form of a boat being a symbol for the self, a container for the soul both in life and at the time of death. In many cultures people used to be 'waked' in boats and would be sent off to sea or burnt on a pyre, in a vessel to carry their spirit away.
For her there is something quite meaningful around the act of waiting for a tree to grow for a purpose that is now linked to her death, and that its growth and her own are now connected. This tree has now become a metaphor and a symbol for the artist’s own life span and in a sense for her mothers also, as in 60 years when this tree has grown, her mother will no longer be alive.
It is a spiritual philosophy and an almost practical one that informs the artists perspective on this work, and that is the philosophy that if we become more aware and accepting of death in our everyday lives that we begin to live more fully.
In a way this work is her own exploration around her own quality of living and death and of other people's and embodying the implications of this in her daily life. The acorn saplings for the audience were an invitation to take a ''seed'' away with them.