Mel Carter

bitter, the mourning

bitter, the mourning explores spiritual practice, ecological consciousness, and cultural learnings through transparent glass vessels and their symbolic contents.

A clear glass filled with water sits on a dark surface. At the bottom of the glass, a key is partially buried in a layer of white sand. Reflections appear on the water and glass. — Mel Carter. Bowen (hinoki), Hot Hot Hot Hot, Double Garage Gallery (installation view), 2024. Glass vessel, sea salt, hinoki oil, grain alcohol, cascarilla, mica, selenite, ground bone, and wishbone. Photo: Jueqian Fang

June 5 - 26, 2025
Opening: Thursday, June 5, 6:00 — 8:00pm

Drawing from a transformative period of personal change over the past four years—traveling across five countries and over 22 cities; with old, new, and chosen families; through births and deaths—Mel Carter considers how inherited stories and cultural fables endure, evolve, and remain relevant through contemporary contexts. Their glass vessels serve as metaphors for personal and cultural memories: fragile yet resilient, simultaneously containing and revealing.

How can ancestral knowledge guide our relationships to the environment in this time of unprecedented change? To answer this question, Carter draws wisdom from resilient, medicinal, and edible plants sustained by Indigenous communities throughout time, utilizing their properties for arts, craft, shelter, medicines, and storytelling despite centuries of colonial disruption. They also explore traditions blending Japanese folk customs and spirituality, shedding light on the interconnections of human ritual and natural systems.

By engaging with adaptive traditions, bitter, the mourning positions cultural memory not as a static archive, but as living practice. It reflects on ways spiritual frameworks can address environmental challenges and how our relationship with materials might reshape notions of permanence, consumption, and responsibility—locally and beyond. In the gallery, ephemeral materials respond to environmental conditions, emphasizing that preservation requires transformation.

The glass works were created during an artist residency at the Museum of Glass, with support from the Hot Shop Team: Ben Cobb, Gabe Feenan, and Sarah Gilbert. The liquids are inspired by stories and ethnobotanical elements from the Ainu, Ryūkyūan, and Maya Yucatec regions, as well as what is now called the United States and Canada.

Mel Carter. Benten (detail), February 2022, Veronica Project Space, 2022. Barley, calendula, cardamom, chilies, chrysanthemum, cinnamon, clove, foxglove, galangal, gardenia oil, collected glass vessels, gobō, grain alcohol, himalayan pink salt, hinoki, jasmine oil, lavender, lions mane, mugwort, passionflower, peony, powdered eggshell, powdered oyster shell, rice paper, rose, rutilated quartz, saffron, sake, salt, satsuma peel, skullcap, sugar, tapioca, turmeric, teas, ume, and water. Photo: Jueqian Fang

About the Artist

Mel Carter is a mixed Yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese), queer, and non-binary artist based in Seattle. Working across installation and various mediums, they explore cultural heritage, ritual, mythology, and environmental consciousness, often using water and other liquids as metaphors linking marine ecosystems to ancestral and spiritual realms. They use ephemeral, earth-returning materials that reflect their commitment to place and waste reduction on Coast Salish lands, choosing and reusing materials that honor heritage, support healthy ecosystems, and challenging norms around consumption and permanence in the arts. Carter’s work draws from Japanese, Buddhist, and Shinto traditions, as well as explorations of modern witchcraft, using glass vessels and symbolic mixtures to explore healing, protection, retribution, and divination—infusing physical spaces with layered meanings that connect ancestral knowledge with lived experience.