Carrying histories: Earth and fire, metaphors and metamorphosis, in the ceramic practice of Thu-Van Tran

In our earliest online exchanges, leading up to our first in-person meeting in Australia, artist Thu-Van Tran tells me how she has been inspired by the ‘Coolamon’ (Wiradjuri/Wiradyuri: gulaman), a precious Indigenous object¹:

In Aboriginal symbology, this vessel is traditionally used to carry food or to cradle children. It’s a beautiful example of how an everyday object, seemingly modest, holds deep significance — honoring care, family and community life.²

It’s heartening to hear that Tran, a leading French-Vietnamese contemporary artist who was born in Ho Chi Minh City and has lived and worked in Paris since a young age, is learning about Australia’s Indigenous histories, cultures and creativity during her long-term international studio residency in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. She has been hosted by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), as part of its International Studio Exchange Program, during the Indigenous Noongar seasons of the first half of 2025, starting her residency in the hottest season of Bunuru (February–March), with its flowering gum trees and reddening seed cones, through to cooler, damper and breezier weather in Djeran (April–May), with its red florals and red rusted she-oak trees, and ending at the very beginnings of the coldest and wettest season of Makuru (June–July) marked by its blue and purple flowers and the influx of birds preparing to nest and breed for the remainder of the season. 

Over the course of her residency and these changing seasons, Tran had been experimenting with ceramics in particular—more precisely, ceramic vessels or receptacles that have the potential to receive, to hold, to carry, to cradle, invoking her latest knowledge of the Coolamon. I am reminded of the many Indigenous cultures of the world in which the ‘carrier’, as a container and technology for gathering and sharing, continues to hold so much significance. It is something which author Ursula K. Le Guin helped to popularise in the late 1980s with her celebrated essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’³ and which later, feminist theorist Donna Haraway linked with Indigenous activist and creative cultures of Columbia in an introduction she wrote to accompany the republication of Le Guin’s essay in 1996.⁴ For Le Guin, the ‘carrier bag’ symbolised a different set of relations among humanity, one centred on community, gathering and sharing, rather than technologies valorising the heroics and violence of war, conquest and domination. Quoting from feminist Elizabeth Fisher, Le Guin points out in her essay that,

Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

Le Guin goes on to underline the utmost significance of the carrier when she asks,

…what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. 

Before—once you think about it, surely long before—the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger—for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug ones you can’t eat home in—with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.⁵

Haraway’s later framing of Le Guin’s text repositions the vital significance of the carrier bag within contemporary communities in Columbia who are ‘carrying’ out urgent environmental and racial justice work at this critical time of the Anthropocene—a reminder of the integral role of the carrier as an essential form in enabling acts of care and activism. Indeed, the carrier vessel has long been valued, across a variety of cultures of the Majority World, that is, outside the West, in practices of gathering, carrying and sharing, especially in Indigenous and matriarchal societies.  

The Indigenous reverence for the dual quality of fire is also of deep interest to Tran in her practice. She thinks about it in terms of the Vietnamese Buddhist culture she grew up in, “where we trust consequences of cycles” she says, the natural energy cycle of new life which follows catastrophic fire events. Birth, life, and death, she explains, are always in communion in Buddhist thinking. It was in this sense that Tran connected the cycles of nature and culture to the elemental forms of earth and fire to create her new ceramic works during her residency at PICA. Alongside this interest in nature’s cycles however, is also her interest in the impacts of colonisation and industrialisation on the Australian landscape and Indigenous Country—indeed, these intersecting themes of nature, colonisation, and industrialisation repeat throughout Tran’s oeuvre as consistent lines of enquiry. In Boorloo, Tran is particularly conscious of the huge mining industry that dominates the Western Australian economy and sustains the national economy of Australia—that is, as anthropologist Anna Tsing observes, the capitalist-driven transformations of the environment (or ‘second nature’).⁸ Landscapes such as Kalgoorlie, which Tran visited during her residency, have been thoroughly changed by mining activities—previously primarily for prospecting gold, and now for the extraction of nickel, lithium, iron, and other rare earth elements. Invoking Tsing again, what might possibly survive in this landscape after the ruins of capitalism?

Before I meet Tran, I visit the Art Gallery of Western Australia. At the ground floor exhibition of Indigenous art, by chance, I encounter several Coolamons. I am first struck by the beauty of a woven Coolamon cradling the figure of a baby, crafted from grasses—the artwork Baby (1999) by Joyce Winsley, of Wilman and Goreng ancestry. Traditionally, the Coolamon is a large and shallow dish-like vessel of roughly 30–70 centimetres with curved sides, mimicking the shape of a canoe, and was principally used by Indigenous women to carry water.¹⁰ Over time, the term has been adopted to describe other types of carrier vessels found in different Indigenous communities across Australia, to carry water as well as to hold food and herbs, to transport fire embers from one place to another to begin new fires, and to cradle babies, among other purposes. The different Coolamon and other Indigenous carrier types I encounter in the gallery each hold stories, memories and histories in them of Indigenous communities and Country. Moreover, their inclusion in the art gallery acknowledges the creativity and artistry that each embodies. 

I carry these images and stories embodied by Coolamons with me in preparation for my first meeting with Tran. We sit at a table outside in the late morning sun of Makuru to find out more about each other—myself, an art historian of the contemporary art of Asia, especially Southeast Asia and its artist diasporas—and for me to learn more about Tran’s intense period of honing her ceramic ‘carrier-making’ skills in Boorloo. 

Tran is a contemporary, multidisciplinary artist, whose practice consistently engages with the possibilities of sculptural forms and installations, often via an expanded sense of ‘sculpture’ that is in dialogue with painting, photography, film, architectural and monumental forms, as well as natural environments. As with other artists of the Vietnamese diaspora, the artist’s practice has also connected her Vietnamese ancestries with intersecting colonial histories, especially that of French Indochina. Her works reflect her experiences navigating different cultures, languages, and national identities between Vietnam, where she was born in 1979 following the Vietnam War, and France, where she and her family fled to in 1981 when Tran was just two years of age. 

Tran cites literature, architecture, and history as important reference points for her sculptural practice to date. Prior to her residency work at PICA, among other notable ‘sculptural’ works that Tran has produced are her installations: Red Rubber (2017) for the 57^th Venice Biennale, with its striking wax casts of rubber tree-trunks, exploring the consequences of introduced rubber plantations in Vietnam; Peau Blanche (White Skin) (2017), with its haunting gathering of white plaster casts presented in blue cases—reminiscent of dismembered body parts—each cast moulded directly from parts of statues erected in Paris in the 1920s to commemorate the glory of French colonial expansion; Barque du Palacio (Palacio’s Boat) (2007), an archetype of a boat, made of wood, that appears trapped in the physical confines of its ‘retrofuturist’ apartment complex; 82 Tortues Me Disent (82 Turtles Tell Me) (2019) consisting of 82 wax tortoises supporting stelae on their shells, and the related film 24 heures à Hanoï (24 Hours in Hanoi) (2019), based on the artist’s day-long trip in the northern Vietnamese city, both paying tribute to the fifteenth-century stone turtle stelae at the Hanoi Temple of Literature, a monument honouring Vietnamese scholars; and Roman sans Titre (Novel without a Title) (2018) evoking a forest floor in the aftermath of fire with its scattered gathering of hundreds of burnt ceramic leaves, each shaped by an individual rubber-tree leaf from a plantation in South Vietnam—a work Tran created with artisans from the famed Vietnamese ceramics village of Bát Tràng.

Continuing her interest in sculptural installation, in Boorloo, Tran’s final installation of over twenty ceramic works presented at the end of her residency period at PICA offers a sprawling array of carriers in myriad shapes and hues, recalling the essential qualities and traits of one of the primary art forms of ceramics—sculptural pottery. Her installation is a response to the environment of Western Australia and a homage to this humble, vernacular pottery form, so integral to humanity, the carrier vessel. As Tran explains,

When we hear ceramic, we also immediately think of pottery, because we use clay to build functional objects for our daily lives, like recipients or plates… I really want to draw attention to this aspect of ceramics and to useful objects. For me, it’s about Mingei, the Japanese philosophy that recognises the dignity of craftsmanship and the elegance of modesty in everyday objects—bowls, jars, baskets, textiles—imbued with a spirit of community and grace.

Alongside this emphasis on the utility of the ceramic object, the sophistication of Tran’s installation underlines the historically overlooked beauty and creativity of simple, handmade functional art and crafts created by ‘anonymous’ crafts people, especially those often found in colonial museum collections. Her work seeks to “honour the beauty behind such daily life objects for what they keep in their humble existence and also their humble way of appearance,” recognising that in the past their makers lived simple, humble lives but nevertheless crafted these handmade objects with utmost care and attention for use by all people in their everyday life. This respect for craft and craftmakers is also shaped by Tran’s time working with the Compagnons du Devoir in the early 2000s, a companionship of craftspeople in France dating from the Middle Ages. Similarly, Tran notes, in his development of ‘Afro-Mingei’, a hybrid of Japanese and Black cultures, Black American artist Theaster Gates celebrates the creativity and even political resistance to be found in everyday craft practices, and honours the historically unidentified people who crafted such objects for a living.

As a collection, Thu-Van Tran’s carriers are suggestive of a typology of carrier shapes, and a glossary of symbols or metaphors. Some glisten in the light, with their glazed surfaces commanding our initial attention, while others bear more muted, earthen colours. Some are more low-lying, flattened, and bulbous, others take on elongated, triangular, and pointed or conical forms. Some bear covers or lids, others are gaping and cavernous, as if mouths wide open. Some are whole and complete, in and of themselves, while others seem to remind us that they are necessarily parts of a whole. 

On my last day in Boorloo, I visit the Art Gallery of Western Australia again. This time, inspired by Tran’s ceramic works, I make my way to the gallery’s sculpture collection. There is an assortment of both historical and contemporary sculptures. On this occasion, I am drawn to the more modern and contemporary works interspersed throughout the more classical pieces, mindful of how Tran also continues the long-standing tradition of ceramics as a contemporary artist. 

My final visit is to the adjacent Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip, with its scientific and ethno-cultural collections. With little time remaining before I leave Boorloo, I ask the docent to help me: “Do you know if the Museum has any Coolamon objects on display?” I’m astounded at the breadth and precision of the docent’s knowledge. She takes a map of the museum and quickly circles the locations of all of the Coolamons she recalls on display. I take the map with me to locate over a dozen Coolamon and other carrier objects. In too many historical instances though, the maker is stated as unknown. But, of course, someone knew these makers, at some time. The maker was actually once known, not unknown.¹¹     

In the case of Tran’s carriers, we are invited to recall the multiple ways these traditionally humble craft vessels have embodied deep meaning and profound beauty for many throughout history, a testament to their makers and their contexts of making. As symbolic expressions, they represent a language for relating with nature, reflecting Tran’s experiences of intercultural sharing and learning in Australia; indeed, as a foreigner to Australia, finding a relatable language with and through nature was key to Tran establishing cultural connection. Thus, Tran’s carriers remind us not only of the creativity held within them, but also their integral relationship to the people, cultures, environments, and materialities which shape them, their valued role and function in sustaining everyday life and nurturing communities, and their continuing symbolic significance as carriers of stories and histories.