Mel Carter: bitter, the mourning

June 5 - 26, 2025 Opening: Thursday, June 5, 6:00 — 8:00pm Drawing from a transformative period of personal change over the past four years—traveling across five countries and over 22 cities; with old, new, and chosen families; through births and deaths—Mel Carter considers how inherited stories and cultural fables endure, evolve, and remain relevant through contemporary contexts. Their glass vessels serve as metaphors for personal and cultural memories: fragile yet resilient, simultaneously containing and revealing. How can ancestral knowledge guide our relationships to the environment in this time of unprecedented change? To answer this question, Carter draws wisdom from resilient, medicinal, and edible plants sustained by Indigenous communities throughout time, utilizing their properties for arts, craft, shelter, medicines, and storytelling despite centuries of colonial disruption. They also explore traditions blending Japanese folk customs and spirituality, shedding light on the interconnections of human ritual and natural systems. By engaging with adaptive traditions, "bitter, the mourning" positions cultural memory not as a static archive, but as living practice. It reflects on ways spiritual frameworks can address environmental challenges and how our relationship with materials might reshape notions of permanence, consumption, and responsibility—locally and beyond. In the gallery, ephemeral materials respond to environmental conditions, emphasizing that preservation requires transformation. The glass works were created during an artist residency at the Museum of Glass, with support from the Hot Shop Team: Ben Cobb, Gabe Feenan, and Sarah Gilbert. The liquids are inspired by stories and ethnobotanical elements from the Ainu, Ryūkyūan, and Maya Yucatec regions, as well as what is now called the United States and Canada.

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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3051285-0

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