Ben Cooke-Akaiwa
United States
“ Shadowed Thoughts “
"Everything has been touched by red, it is love and it is pain. It is the memory of a loved one. When I received the prompt “Shadowed Thoughts,” I intended to create a cloisonné self portrait that would crack open. I took the theme to mean the thoughts that hold you down, that make you feel less than or a failure. This theme felt familiar as my recent work has largely been about grief and the effect of loss on the psyche. Ultimately, I decided my initial plan didn't fit with what I think of as ""my work"" so I shifted gears and began raising a small lidded vessel. I use the vessel form to represent the body. What is the body but a vessel to hold our collected thoughts and feelings?
This vessel is damaged, the crack down the front limiting its intended use. The crack resonates with those who have hit their breaking point, who can no longer contain their thoughts. The tolls of its accumulated experience are now impossible to conceal. The vessel represents those feelings of anxiety when we attempt to bottle them up. We can maintain this facade only so long before we finally pop. Initially, I had created the vessel without a lid, allowing light to pour in from the top and out through the crack. A vessel doomed to fail at its intended task. As I worked through what the vessel means as an object, I found myself fitting a lid in a vain attempt to conceal what lurks inside the shadowed interior."
