Vessels for Life | Handmade Memorial Vessels & Urns

VESSELS FOR LIFE

Handmade in Belfast

A vessel made from the earth, to hold someone you love

________________________________________________

 

________________________________________________

 

Vessels for Life

Recently, I was honoured to be asked to make a vessel to hold the ashes of someone very important to us.

When the time came, I was struck by how difficult it was to find something that felt right. The choices available felt quite impersonal and, for something holding what was so extraordinarily precious, I wanted something more special. So I went back to what I know, clay.

I made a simple lidded vessel by hand in my Belfast studio. It was never intended to become a collection, but afterwards people began asking if I could make something similar for someone they had lost.

And so Vessels for Life began.

Each vessel is individually made by hand, a piece of pottery designed to live quietly and beautifully in the home, holding something incredibly precious for as long as you need it to. And, if a time comes when you feel ready to let go, the vessel can be placed or buried somewhere meaningful. Its material comes from the earth and can ultimately be returned to it, in your own time.

A vessel made from the earth, to hold someone you love.

 

Vessels For Life

THE POTTER. THE CLAY. THE VESSEL.

BEFORE THE VESSEL

It began in a potter's shed in Benburb

Long before Vessels for Life, there was a little shed, an out-building, which was part of the Servite Order of Mary's Priory in Benburb, County Tyrone. It became my first pottery studio.

I rebuilt the space with the help of some friends and a couple of priests at the Priory and opened my first studio & gallery - that sounds very grand, but believe me, it was a very simple place, but a very special one, the place where I really began to understand what it meant to make things by hand, and to make a living out of it.

There was a family connection to the building that I didn't fully appreciate at the time. My uncle, John Molloy, had trained for the priesthood at the Servite Priory in the 1950s. As a young man there, one of his jobs was looking after the pigs. And the pig shed he worked in was the very same little building that, decades later, became my pottery studio.

How the Vessels For Life began

Father Eoin O’Malley

Around that time, Father Eoin O'Malley told me about a passage from the Bible. He spoke about being called to “go down to the potter's house” — although in my head, and in my memory of that conversation, it has always been:

“Go down to the potter's shed.”

I'm not particularly religious, but something about that image stayed with me.

Years later, while thinking about these vessels, I went looking for the passage again. It comes from the Book of Jeremiah, where he goes down to the potter and watches him working with clay at his wheel. And there was a detail I hadn't remembered. In the King James translation, the piece being made is described as:

“the vessel that he made of clay…”

The potter. The clay. The vessel.

There is something very old and very human in that image. Long before pottery became decorative, we took earth into our hands and made vessels from it, to hold the things we needed, the things we valued and the things we wanted to keep safe.

All these years after that first conversation in my little studio at Benburb, I find myself making vessels to hold something more precious than I could ever have imagined then.

Clay from the earth. Shaped by hand. Transformed by fire.

Earth to earth. Ashes to ashes.

A vessel made from the earth, to hold someone you love.

Every Vessel for Life begins with clay. I make each one individually in my Belfast studio using red earthenware, a warm, natural clay that I have deliberately allowed to remain visible as part of the finished piece.

The vessel and its lid are made separately and carefully brought together. They are dried slowly before being fired, glazed and returned to the kiln. There are no moulds producing identical objects. The shape of each vessel, the movement of the glaze and the marks left by making will vary slightly from one to the next.

That matters to me.

These are objects made to hold something entirely individual, and I think the vessel itself should retain something of the hand that made it.

Finally, a fine gold thread is wrapped around each piece. For me, that thread is about connection, the people whose lives become woven through our own and remain there, even after they are gone.

From earth, through fire, finished by hand.

A VESSEL FOR LIFE

We keep photographs. Letters. Jewellery. A favourite coat hanging for longer than it probably needs to.

Small things become extraordinarily precious because of the people we associate with them. I wanted these vessels to belong to that same world. Not something that needs to be hidden away, and not something that immediately announces what it contains.

And because every vessel begins with earth, there is something fitting in knowing that, one day, it may return there too. You may choose to keep the vessel and its precious contents close to you at home, or place it somewhere meaningful, in a garden of remembrance, beneath a tree, in woodland, or in another special place.

However it is kept, its material comes from the earth and can ultimately be returned to it.

Simply a beautiful object, made by hand, holding someone you love.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Made for a life remembered.

Vessels For Life