Heidi Lau’s Spirit Vessels | Art21 “New York Close Up”

The first ever artist-in-residence at famed Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, sculptor Heidi Lau channels personal history, colonial culture, and the spiritual world through her hands and into her otherworldly clay works. Delighting in chance and improvisation, Lau shapes all her clay sculptures by hand and applies overlapping layers of glaze to create iridescent works that resemble architectural forms, funerary vessels or mourning garments. “Instead of me sculpting it, it’s like it’s sculpting me back,“ Lau says of her chosen medium. Set on the grounds and in the Catacombs of Green-Wood, this film explores a uniquely tactile yet spiritual relationship between an artist and her material. Growing up in Macau Lau explored the colonial ruins left behind from Portuguese rule, while also being immersed in the city’s original Chinese culture and history. Lau’s later sculptures call back to these disparate influences, intermingling Portuguese and Chinese architectural elements while als