Containers for Knowledge is a series of mixed-media panels combining text and imagery to highlight bodily knowledge as a valuable source of information about our mental, emotional, and physical states and elevate it to the level of scholarly knowledge. Phrases such as, “My body knows something my mind can’t remember,” and “My hair stands on end” point to intuitive knowledge. Alongside the tension between intuition and intellect, the pieces point to dichotomies between human and nonhuman ways of knowing by juxtaposing images of human skin with natural surfaces, including rocks and bark.  

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The series draws on Western European cultural history, referencing both classical Greek and Christian imagery as two major influences on the Western academic tradition and hierarchy of knowledge. The jar serves as a stand-in for the human body, evoking the gendered myth of Pandora and the unleashing of a specific breed of emotional knowledge into the world. Through scale and the use of gold, the images echo Christian iconography, yet give bodily knowledge reverence that it is traditionally denied. 

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Containers for Knowledge is an epistemological project that explores the impulse to collect and contain knowledge, inviting contemplation of which forms of knowledge we recognize, value, and respond to.