Storyteller

Storyteller features ceramic works by artist Jami Porter Lara, who uses a 2000-year- old clay process to make objects that resemble a ubiquitous icon of modern life – the plastic bottle. Her purpose is to reconceptualize the plastic bottle to better represent its function as a precious object – a vessel – capable of sustaining human life. By pulling the plastic bottle away from the profane and towards what we perceive to be beautiful or natural or sacred, the artist asks audiences to recognize the water bottle as it belongs to the long human history of functional vessels that we use to contain and transport the necessities of life; to see the iconic forms embedded in its design and the human creativity that gave rise to it; and to recognize that these qualities exist alongside everything else that is bad, absurd, ugly, and unsustainable.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website