These ceramic cups manipulate and modify users’ behavior to cultivate patience and perseverance, focus and guidance. For example, to drink from Patience, you must counter-intuitively tip the vessel away from your lips, allowing the liquid to flow into another channel, before tipping the cup forward again to bring the beverage back along an elevated path to your mouth. This prompts a more mindful experience, asking you to be more patient when drinking—making it a ritual of patience. Each sculptural ceramic cup is surrounded by a cluster of identical paper ones, which you are welcome to experiment with. The process of engaging with these unfamiliar, delicate objects is intended to be a communal experience, based in communication, exploration, and bonding. Centered within these functional cups, abstract sculptures with grasping ceramic appendages tenuously attached to ghostly white spheres reference ancient and primordial forms and symbolize the lost connection to human spirituality. Collectively, these participatory and sculptural objects offer guided actions and contemplative mindfulness to remedy the lack of ritual in contemporary American society, providing access to the spiritual and the metaphysical.
