Fragility and HopeA Mutifaith Art Exhibit
to enable artists to voice the challenges and concerns we face around
the AIDS epidemic.
Tina Conlon and other selected artists shows their art works in the Archives
and Museum, St. James Catheral Parish House to concide with XVI International
AIDS Conference, August 13 to 18, here in Toronto.
Item shown is called "Ting" Ceramic Bowl
The TING or Three Legged
Cooking Pot, may possibly have developed out of the need to warm
food and drink over a low fire by resting three similar
cone shaped pots against one another with their mouths touching
- in a sort of pyramid shape over the charcoal embers. One pot with three points
or
legs will straddle a pile of embers and allow the heat to warm
the pot
better and is more stable than three pots just touching. However
it originated, the tripod shaped pot became popular in China and in historical
times
was
called a ting.
This idea was taken from a Neolithic bowl found in Hunan dated
from about 3rd millennium BC. Women in some pre-literate cultures painted
their breasts with this spiral pattern. The three main shapes which comprise
the main form of the pot are close to the form of an udder or breast. Just
as this bowl could have been used as a pot for cooking and sustained the living,
such a vessel would also have been a grave gift. These forms suggest
that this offering contained life-giving milk to sustain the living, or,
if a grave gift, the dead person. Such bowls are not an uncommon grave find.
This tripod form is one of the very few distinctive prehistoric ceramic
shapes which survived into historic times in China.
For more information about this art exhibition, visit: http://www.stjamescathedral.on.ca/.
