Studio Sessions
Para-Site: Vessel as Host
with Désirée Coral
February 2025
About the Studio Session
Scientific findings point towards clay playing an important role in the emergence of life. Clay may have concentrated small organic molecules essential for life and fostered their condensation to generate large molecules such as RNA, DNA, and proteins. These molecules would have been primitive predecessors to those that developed fully in living organisms.”*
Today wild clay continues to be a host to living organisms that, in the right conditions, are capable of growing and developing. During the covid lockdowns of 2020, Désirée opened a long-time sealed bucket of clay in her studio and found that this material from the Amazonian area of Ecuador had quietly sprouted the most magnificent ferns. When clay becomes ceramic, and in particular when it becomes a ceramic vessel, it also hosts various sources of life. Whether it is in the form of a plant pot, a bowl of food, a house sheltering people, or as a kiln containing fire, there is always a relationship between the ceramic host and its guest.
In life commensalism is a long-term relationship between two species where one benefits, but the other isn’t affected—neither helped nor harmed. This is different from mutualism, where both species benefit, amensalism, where one species is harmed but the other is unaffected, and parasitism, where one species benefits at the expense of the other.** In this Studio Session we experiment and reflect about the role of ceramics/clay as a host, as a site, and as an unavoidable entity of companionship.
*Dr. Javier Cuadros, researcher at the Natural History Museum in London
**definitions from wikipedia
About the Lead Artist
Désirée Coral is an Ecuadorian artist who received her Doctoral degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in Scotland in 2024, and her MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.
Désirée was the Glasgow Seed Library’s 2022 first artist and researcher in residence at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow. She was a resident at the Arts Cabinet as part of a research and publication consortium that included various academic European institutions in 2021.
From 2023-2024, She was granted an Artist in residency for one year, where she developed the project Living Table at Forgan Arts Centre. She has recently exhibited at Tignous Centre pour les Arts, Montreuil, Paris. CCA Glasgow, Green Gallery Botanical Garden's UOD. She has previously presented work at MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Arts Detroit, The Sullivan Galleries Chicago, Mana Contemporary Chicago, CAC Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, Museo Camilo Egas Quito, Alliance Française Quito, Exprimento Limon, Madrid among other national and international venues and collaborations.
Her artist books are part of several collections, such as: Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library Yale University Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library Columbia University, The Special Collections at Chelsea College of Arts Library's Artists' Books Collection, Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Irish Visual Arts Library, Glasgow School of Art Library Services, University of California, Irvine Libraries, Artexte, University of Michigan Library's Artists' Book Collection, Michigan State University Libraries, University of Leeds University Library's Special Collections Artists' Book Collection, Bruce Peel Special Collections, University of Alberta, and Edinburgh College of Art Library.
Désirée's artistic exploration and research delves into the captivating realm of early global exchanges from the Americas to the rest of the world and vice versa, using a decolonial lens to understand the contemporary relationships between humans, inter-species, and landscape.
Logistics
This session is scheduled for Saturdays February 1, 8, 15, and 22 from 11am-1pm PST (that’s Los Angeles time).
Registration is $250 and includes all four sessions.
Participants gather via Zoom.