ȯi-stər · ve-səl

a collaboration with Omar Tate

Our project, ˈȯi-stər, builds on our previous collaborations to connect people in conversations about nourishment, community, and Black craft through processes of making, growing, and eating. ˈȯi-stər · ve-səl consists of 100 hand-thrown porcelain jars, hundreds of porcelain oyster shells, a single large-scale water vessel, and a stoneware jar by Thomas Commeraw from the Winterthur museum collection. The project explores histories of taste, cultivation, trauma, and joy and reclaims and reimagines oysters as sources of sustenance, facilitators of memory-keeping, and poetic expressions of identity. 

In 2022, together, we received a Winterthur Maker-Creator Research Fellowship at the Winterthur Museum. Throughout the fellowship we studied the relationship between ceramics made by enslaved African Americans and abolitionists ceramics produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Resulting in a sculptural installation entitled ˈȯi-stər · ve-səl and view at Winterthur as part of the exhibition Transformations: Contemporary Artists at Winterthur, ˈȯi-stər · ve-səl is grounded by the work of two significant historical figures: Oysterman Thomas Downing and potter Thomas Commeraw. Together we made porcelain jars and pickled oysters. Omar’s pickled oysters act as a prompt to the question “What is your relationship to oysters” and the ceramic oyster jars act as a canvas for the answers, embossed with textual recordings of Black voices.