The estimated number of children and babies killed in Gaza over the course of the genocidal war is (or at least was when I began this project) 20,000 . Twenty thousand lives. Twenty thousand futures. A number so large it inevitably becomes abstract, a faceless statistic.
The Vertex Project is my attempt to undo that abstraction.
Over the coming months and years, I am making 20,000 ceramic baby heads by hand, one for each of those children. Every head is unique and has been nurtured and loved. Each one is formed, touched, named in the making, fired, and glazed using experimental techniques that mean no two come out the same. The process is slow like gestation. Each head takes time because each child took time to grow, to be born, to become a person with a face and a way of looking at the world. The kiln is a kind of collective vessel, a cremation furnace and a melting pot.
This is not a project about one conflict alone. Just in the last few days a girls school was bombed in Iran. Ukranian Children are routinely targeted, abducted and naturalised into Russia. Alan Kurdi died trying to reach asylum in UK waters. It is a pattern of loss that repeats across wars and generations and the particular vulnerability of children, the way their deaths are reported and then forgotten, absorbed into statistics and geopolitical narratives make it easier to look away. I don't want to look away anymore. An I want politicians and businesses profiting from war to look into their little faces too.
What your support makes possible
To make 20,000 heads, I need clay, glazes, kiln time, and the organisation of community workshops where others can contribute to the making. The project is also growing beyond the studio. I want to bring the heads into public spaces including exhibitions, community events, meetings with MPs and policymakers in order to make the scale of loss visible in a room, to let people stand among them and feel what 20,000 means.
Any funds raised beyond the cost of materials and events will go directly to charities supporting children affected by conflict, including Medical Aid for Palestinians, UNICEF, and Highland-Palestine.
You can donate here: gofundme.com/f/children-killed-or-injured-in-war
Why this, why now
I am a researcher and a maker. My academic work has taken me into the lives of people whose voices are systematically excluded, people in psychiatric institutions, people with disabilities, people caught in systems that do not see them clearly. My art has always been in conversation with that work: trying to find forms that hold what language struggles to hold.
The baby heads are made in a shed in the Highlands, one at a time. They are accumulating. Some are dark and heavy. Some pale and fragile. Some look startled. Some look wise. When you put them together in a group they begin to interact and to form relationships, hierarchies, communities. They become something more than individual objects. They become a collective, an army, a movement.
That is the point. Twenty thousand is not a number.
Please share and donate if you can.
Even a small contribution keeps the clay and the kilns going. Even sharing the link puts these children in front of more eyes. The project will take years. But that too feels right. We should not be able to forget this quickly.
