A vessel represents potential. With what it is filled and how much it is filled are deliberate choices that we make, and how we consider a vessel and its contents can provide insight into our own emotional outlook. Vessels can contain our stories; our pasts, presents, and futures. And in artistic practice, the human body can be abstracted to represent a vessel through which we can safely explore our aspirations, our fears, and our desires. We navigate both the external and internal unknowns through the exploration of the body; what it holds onto and what it contains within.

The three artists in Contained Within explore conscious and subconscious realities in their work. They express potentiality through visual storytelling and use different types of vessels as vehicles with which to interrogate the unknown. Their choice of process informs their work, both mirroring and reinforcing the visual and emotional quality of the stories that they have chosen to share.

Emma Powell has always had a contentious relationship with sleep. Avoiding it as a child, her father would invent fantastical stories to lure her to the land of slumber, blurring the lines between the waking and sleeping worlds. In her series In Search of Dreams, Emma recreates this shadowy realm in order to explore her real-life questions. Toning her cyanotypes with substances that relate to the different levels of consciousness evoked within her imagery, such as tea and wine, Emma creates a visual lullaby that allows her to safely explore what she loves, fears, remembers, and imagines.

Influenced by witnessing the slow deterioration of a loved one, Stephanie Slate explores the subconscious in her series The In-Between. Interested in the notion of the human body serving as a vessel to contain a soul, she ponders where we go when we sleep and when we die and what might be the fate of the energy that lives within us. Using the Photogravure process, Stephanie creates images that float in a moment of limbo, trapped between the real and the imagined. By blurring the line between reality and the subconscious and expressing the elusive and transcendental essence of the human experience, she invites viewers to delve into the depths of their own psyches.

In her series, Seeking Solace, Rebecca Zeiss creates anonymous portraits of people holding chosen objects; objects that have been transformed into memory vessels that house recollected narratives. Working on an individual level with each of her sitters and channeling them through what they choose to share of themselves, their stories, and their objects, Rebecca arrives at what she calls an empathic visual. Working in the wet plate collodion process, it is the stories that she seeks to share; stories of loss or pain and stories of epiphany and amazement.