Whenever I looked up “Vietnamese ceramics”, I was disappointed to find blue and white everywhere. English-speaking sources and higher art institutes only spoke of Vietnam as China’s labor force.
But when searching in Vietnamese, I found brown.
Gốm hoa nâu (“gohm hwa no”), or brown patterned ceramics, were made during the 11th-19th century. This directly followed Vietnam’s hard-fought independence as a nation and so in defiance, the style was loose and free. It continued into a period where they fought off 3 foreign invaders, which is why pots often depicted the people and the strategies they used to defend their indigenous right to be there.
Without knowing it, I had been making brown patterned ceramics for months before even learning of it or its Vietnamese origins.
Touched by this ancestral connection while filled with grief over Gazans, I thought: what better vessel for these modern histories of resistance?
Ti Dinh 