candice cassano//
clay body
candice cassano (she/her) is a toronto-based artist who has been working primarily in ceramics since 2017. she is employed as a case manager for a harm reduction-based supporting housing program for women and co-hosts the two year old monthly, harm reduction happy hour, which aims to bring together frontline workers, peers and allies in the gta.
NILS
in early 2024, after about five years focused on full-time schooling and frontline harm reduction work, and having experienced a series of deaths and losses in both my professional and personal lives beginning the previous fall, i found myself in a place where i had become completely estranged from creative practice, from myself. i was crushed with the heaviness of grief and loss, experienced a mental breakdown, and by the end of the summer, was diagnosed with a neurological autoimmune disease. the opportunity to apply to night/shift came in fall 2024, just as i was beginning to tiptoe my way through the process of holistically re-building ground-up. it was the push i needed to re-engage fully with my pottery practice.
working with clay is the way i externalize the internal and give my deepest self a creative, generative voice. the tactile, repetitive and meditative nature of throwing a pot is a sort of ritualistic outlet to me, resulting in a physical vessel that is emblematic of what needs to be expelled from my mind/body/spirit, regardless of whether this is evident in the finished form. the clay body as human body - how totally biblical, mythological, elemental. the archetypal resonance through time immemorial is no joke!
i recruited five collaborators and assigned each a vessel of mine at random. the urn-like shape of the vessels i created for this project began unintentionally, but soon became the point. i asked the collaborators to let the vessels act as stand-ins for their own physical forms and requested that they do whatever they wanted with/to the vessel to express how grief and loss has affected their own bodies/selves. i asked them to return their finished work or photo/video evidence of their process with the vessel, along with a written statement. my aim in inviting collaboration was to connect the personal to the communal, to experience grief and loss as collective, witnessed and shared, a thread that runs through all of our lives.
i am deeply humbled and awed by the work of my collaborators. all have transformed their vessel-as-body in heart-wrenching ways, by filling, covering, breaking, adding, subtracting and/or reconstructing, speaking to the multiplicity of ways grief and loss leave their marks. what is notable to me is that each collaborator chose to return a finished item to me, rather than opting for the more ephemeral route of documenting process and leaving the piece(s) somewhere else. the desire to have their forms seen and held in testimony through the eyes of others ultimately serves as a means of seeing into ourselves and recognizing our interconnectedness. conceiving of self as other is the key to healing, to love, to justice, to the principles of harm reduction, and to everything i hold dear.
thank you to nils, nat, fiona, melissa and melanie for taking part in this with me.
click on the images below to view each vessel / collaborator
NILS
NAT
NAT
FIONA
FIONA
MELISSA
MELISSA
MELANIE
MELANIE