Josee Vesely-Manning debuts her new Cult Vessel exhibition at Useful Objects, with a range of pieces from glass to paintings.

A cult vessel is a container built for ritual, rather than prosaic, use. Josee Vesely-Manning’s new body of work Cult Vessel sees the term’s two halves drift apart and recombine: a cult is itself a kind of vessel for belief, and in an image economy built on surface, a vessel can develop a cult of its own. Developed in collaboration with Canberra Glassworks, a suite of hand-blown glass perfume bottles carries this conflation directly, holding fragrances by Sweet Caroline (violet, neroli, frankincense) that surround and infuse across the exhibition’s painted surfaces. Desire and devotion share a container.

Large painted banners – closer to flags or curtains than to stretched canvasses – extend the same logic into colour. Forest floor and mineral outcrop sit against Soviet-brutalist housing; nail polish and the latest eyeshadow drop against moss and graffitied concrete. The palette refuses to settle on one register, countercultural or utopian, sacred or bought. The artist’s recent shift to natural mineral pigment paints puts the source of the colour quietly into the argument itself – where it comes from is part of what it means.

Cult Vessel doesn’t resolve the tension it names. It stages it, banner by banner, bottle by bottle.

Josee Vesely-Manning is a visual artist who works with sculptural installation, often incorporating lighting, object design and expanded painting technique. In her practice she explores themes of both material obsolescence and enlivened matter within an invented and idiosyncratic universe of magic, speculative fiction and utopian proposition.

Photos by Pier Carthew.

Exhibition images