Vessels Of Becoming

Hillit Wahlberg's exhibition 'Vessels of Becoming' is on Artsy, by SeeSaw Art Galley

Hillit Wahlberg’s ceramic practice emerged from a prolonged period of emotional labor within corporate structures, where she functioned as what might be termed an affective receptacle, absorbing and managing the emotional demands of others within a toxic institutional environment. In search of a distraction, she turned to the pottery wheel.

What began as an escape became a profound transformation. Rather than positioning herself as a vessel for others, Wahlberg began constructing literal vessels and creating space for her own emotional processing. Through clay, she developed a practice of release rather than containment, of active formation rather than passive endurance. Now, as a full-time studio artist, she produces containers intended not to bear the burdens of others but to accommodate beauty, intentionality, and personal significance. 

'Fed Up', Hillit Wahlberg, Vessels Of Becoming, 2026

These vessels articulate transformation with quiet clarity. They take on rounded, drop-like forms, sometimes accented with touches of 22k gold or a faint, unexpected gleam. Each form emerges from emotion and carries gestures of release, reflection, and becoming. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological insight that a vessel’s essence lies in its emptiness, the work considers how space itself can hold feeling. The interior void is not absence but presence, a site where tension and stillness meet and where form and emptiness sustain one another in a reciprocal relationship. The pieces offer encounters with space made visible and emotion materialized through ceramic form.

Ultimately, Wahlberg’s practice responds to the broader experience of emotional labor, offering clay as a medium for healing and self-reclamation. Her vessels exist between utility and sculpture, and between personal narrative and universal resonance. By transforming her experience of depletion into objects that treat emptiness as generative potential, she reframes containment as deliberate creation and mindful presence. The work joins contemporary conversations about craft as embodied knowledge, suggesting that the meditative, repetitive acts of throwing, shaping, and firing can help reconstruct fractured selfhood. These ceramic forms serve as both archive and testimony, material evidence of a journey from emotional extraction to creative agency, inviting viewers to consider their own relationships to boundaries, capacity, and the spaces they choose or refuse to fill.

'Can't Contain Myself', Hillit Wahlberg, Vessels Of Becoming, 2026

'Spiraling', Hillit Wahlberg, Vessels Of Becoming, 2026