Vessel
Duo Show January 23 - February 1, 2026
Sunniva, as half Irish and half French, situates her practice between two orders: the mystical, oral heritage of Ireland - land of liminal beings - and the rational, structured gravity of France, shaped by law, classification, and Roman moral thought. In this “in-between” space, she forges a sculptural language that draws from Celtic tales of existing between worlds while carrying the ethics and
bodily responsibility of the Latin tradition.
The sculpture emerges from prolonged research into form. From soft, almost embryonic structures, Sunniva moves toward harsher, eroded masses marked by amputation. Within them appear openings - portals, breathing fissures - that do not decorate but allow habitation, as if for newly mythic beings not yet named. The absence of a face intensifies the tension: the figure does not address us as a subject, but as a form - a vessel, a shell, a remainder.
It embodies the paradox of the French idiom avoir ni queue ni tête - “to have neither head nor tail.” Deprived of beginning and end, it escapes sense, classification, and linear narrative. Sunniva deliberately refuses closure, leaving the form open, non-linear, and unsettling. Named Maya, the sculpture evokes many women, mothers, and grandmothers, archetypal yet singular. Her body is heavy and exhausted by perpetual production - biological, emotional, social - but remains a vessel for life, breath, and projection. Resting calmly, she challenges the myth of the female body as pure or ordered, confronting the viewer with sexuality, corporeality, and the autonomy of being. Maya becomes the ground for a new myth, one not yet written, where the body exists not to serve, but to persist.
Text written by Klaudyna Szymańska
