For the first exhibition in the Book Room, Nyssa Mariah Barrick presents a new body of ceramic work alongside Seven Settings, a series of seven pendants set with gemstones, made in collaboration with The Dreamers.
Death has run through much of Barrick’s work. Skulls, bones, the old vocabulary of the memento mori: drawn onto cups and plates, objects made to sustain life, so that their surfaces carried life’s end. In this new series, a departure of her own choosing, desire takes the center. The figures are bound: masked, gagged, harnessed, laced, held in rope and in gloved hands.
Death has not left; it has moved to the edges, and there it shows what the two vocabularies share. Skulls are pinned like hatpins through the rims. Moths spread their wings as if fixed to a collector’s board, and flies, the oldest residents of the vanitas still life, swarm the grounds. The memento mori and the restraint turn out to use the same gestures: the pin, the stitch, the knot, the lace. Both are ways of holding a body in place, of fastening what would otherwise slip away.
Binding is also one of the oldest gestures of the sacred. In one ancient reading, religio comes from religare, to bind back, to tie fast. The devotee and the bound share a posture: a surrender that is chosen, a giving-over of the will that is felt as release rather than loss. Barrick’s iconography knows this. On one plate a Virgin, haloed in rays, shares the surface with a gagged mouth and three red ex-voto eyes. Elsewhere, hands, hearts and eyes appear among the restrained figures. These are the milagros pinned to saints across the borderlands, a short walk from where the work now hangs. Pressed into the back of one plate is the instruction that gives the exhibition its title: Regard Yourself Holy.
Every piece has another side. Turn the plates over and the burnished copper and iron of their undersides carry words stamped into the clay: Don’t Let Them Tame You. Be a Voice, Not an Echo. Spread Love Like Wild Fire. The front shows the body restrained; the back refuses restraint. This is not a contradiction. It is the argument itself. What separates being bound from being tamed is consent. Taming is imposed from outside, while binding, when chosen, is authored. The base of one cup says it plainly, with a wink: For best results, use other side.
The ground she draws on matters too. Damask, gingham, cobalt florals: the patterns of inherited china, the plates kept in a grandmother’s cabinet for occasions that never quite came. China painting was long dismissed as a parlor craft for women. Barrick makes it carry what the parlor would never say aloud. Stitched crosses run along the rims, and they read three ways at once: as the lacing of a corset, as the sutures of a wound, as a row of kisses at the end of a letter.
Seven Settings closes the distance completely. The pendant has a long history as an object of mourning. In the nineteenth century, lockets held the portrait or a lock of hair of the dead and were worn against the heart. Barrick keeps the form and changes the subject. Her pendants carry bodies held in harness and rope, each set with a stone placed where the body is most charged. Worn against the body, the pendant becomes a small binding of its own: the wearer is tied to the image as the image is tied to the wearer. Mourning and desire turn out to be two forms of the same thing, two ways of holding on to what we cannot keep.
At The Dreamers, the program keeps returning to memory, inheritance, loss and what lies beyond them. Barrick’s work enters that conversation from an unexpected direction. It suggests that attachment, the thing that binds us to the living and the dead alike, is never far from the sacred, and that it is most fully ours when we choose it.
