The ashes of family members are literally an integral component of artist TR Ericsson’s work—he mixes the ashes with different mediums when screen-printing. As part of his current exhibition I Was Born To Bring You Into This World at the Everson, the artist worked with local ceramist and Syracuse University professor Margie Hughto and her ceramics student Kwan Jeong to design, throw, glaze, and fire several vessels inspired by the urns that house the funerary ashes of his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Ericsson never felt satisfied with the original urns as the final containers for his loved ones’ ashes, so designing these vessels was an opportunity to reimagine a more appropriate resting place.

Discussing the urns, Ericsson wrote:

There was never a place of significance to rest the original urns. And there was a dread sense of absurdity I attached to them. How could my family have been reduced in this way, held in these relatively cheap metal or wooden containers?The skillfully rendered ceramic form is now a thing of beauty and generosity and care. The necessary glaze required to complete the work was applied before the final firing by dipping my hands into the glaze and clutching at the urns to mimic the active and emotional way I handled them and carried them with me from place to place.

After almost two decades of uncertainty the form and place of significance have both been discovered.

These new urns bear the names and bone fragments of Ericsson’s mother, grandmother, and grandfather, functioning as reliquaries for Susan O’Donnell, Jeanne Robinson, and Lynn Robinson, forever preserving both their bodies and their memory.