VESSELDOM – CERAMICS 2025
As 2025 comes to a close, I am wrapping up my second year of intensive work in ceramics. This year I have been focused almost exclusively on creating vessels. You can view (and purchase) the entire collection here.
I wanted to celebrate the essence of vesseldom. A vessel, at its core, is designed to perform the practical function of containing something. But each vessel in this series is an entity with a personality and a story, an entire world unto itself. Its persona informs how it holds, cradles, and presents an Other, and that which it could contain reflexively transforms its identity.
I have had the time of my life coaxing these objects out of lumps of clay. My arsenal of techniques is ever growing, and the works you see on the following pages were created with a combination of wheel throwing, hand-building and surface design that I continue to dial in with my own secret sauce.
This series reflects a transition in my life, in my art, and perhaps in the greater macrocosm. I spend a lot of time thinking about AI, and using AI. As the most powerful tool in the history of humanity, it has been like a tidal wave of transformation, a full deluge wiping out the old world and leaving us in a vast sea of the Unknown.
An artist can only respond to the world around them. While I continue working in video and digital technology, I have had to loosen my grip entirely as these mediums – and their meaning – shift and change. Working in ceramics has been literally grounding for me, a form of expression that is ancient, tangible, and of the Earth.
Please enjoy this lineup of bold fine art objects created singularly by hand, a year’s worth of my own time as a vessel forever preserved.
Sarah Zucker
December 2nd, 2025
Divine Comedy
Divine Comedy is a series of 100 unique artworks that tell the tale of an artist’s journey through life and crypto art, each correlating to a canto of Dante’s classic work. Handcrafted over the course of 6 months using vintage Kid Pix software from 1993 – my first digital toolset!
The entire series is now available to collect, each work editioned on the blockchain as a unique erc-721 NFT.
http://divinecomedy.xyz
Divine Comedy is a series of 100 unique artworks that tell the tale of an artist’s journey through life and crypto art, each correlating to a canto of Dante’s classic work. Handcrafted over the course of 6 months using vintage Kid Pix software from 1993 – my first digital toolset!
The entire series is now available to collect, each work editioned on the blockchain as a unique erc-721 NFT.
http://divinecomedy.xyz
ARTIST STATEMENT
“In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray”
The Divine Comedy – Inferno, Canto I
The idea for this project came to me in the summer of 2024, after I read the book The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck. While I’m not typically one for the self-help genre, it came recommended as life-changing, and I felt like, yes, some change sounds nice.
The book uses Dante’s Inferno‑Purgatorio‑Paradiso arc to map the climb toward integrity. The author means this not in the sense of moral virtue, but rather the idea of aligning your inner and outer self. I was hooked by this notion, because, like Dante, I too am midway on life’s journey, having found myself lost in a dark wood of error.
The Dark Wood of Error. Inferno Canto 1 of Sarah Zucker’s Divine Comedy.
First, you are stopped in your tracks. Then, you go through hell reckoning with the error of your ways. This is followed by purgatory – a liminal time of healing, a fulcrum between the past and the future. And finally, you reach paradise, where you get to enjoy the outcome of your efforts and see how much richer your life can be when you are finally living in alignment with your truest self.
I have been editioning my art on the blockchain for 6 years, since April 2019. The hype and excitement around NFTs that exploded in 2021 brought a lot of new attention and support to my work, but it was also like trying to surf a tidal wave. The sheer force of it has been staggering.
I was well positioned for the moment. I had already found my voice, honed my craft, and steeled my resolve over many years working as an artist. I understood and had a genuine belief in the technology. And, as a mischief-maker at heart, my psychedelic worldview served me well in navigating the many twists and turns of the experience.
But, the wave finally broke. I found myself far away from where I had started, left to pick up the pieces and make sense of all that washed up alongside me. Asking myself, which adaptations truly serve me, and which were just survival strategies to keep my head above water? Now that things have settled: what kind of artist (and human) do I really want to be? What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to nurture from here?
The artist as a young artist-child (avec beret)
I knew I wanted to go back to basics for this project. After testing a number of workflows, I chose Kid Pix Studio (1993), my first digital art tool, to tell the tale of my own personal reckoning and transformation. This choice has meaning beyond the aesthetic, as the series acts as a channel between the adult artist and the inner child.
The works contain the same DNA as my long-running Videopainting style, as KidPix Studio and my Sony Videopainter originate from the same early computer graphic era. I relish the charge of minting these archaic pixels to the still-nascent future of the blockchain.
The day I got Kid Pix in December 1992.
And so, I set out on this quest in November of 2024, making an artwork a day (with some syncopation), until I completed the series in April 2025. There are 100 artworks, each correlating to a canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
I have woven a great deal of meaning into it; linger on the series as a whole or zoom into the details of any single canto piece and you will begin to see the hypertext throughout.
This is the tale I want to tell, not only of my personal experience, but of our collective journey. If you are in the world of crypto art, my hope is that you will see your story here. We’ve seen some weird shit, and now it’s time to reflect.
But, even in hell, it’s good to stay playful. To view even our own misdeeds and suffering with a wink. It is all equally sacred and profane – best to try and have a little fun with it.
Divine Comedy is composed of 99 still JPEG tableaux painted pixel-by-pixel, and 1 analog video artwork representing the ecstatic “Beatific Vision” as a grand finale. Each work is a single edition, minted as an erc-721 on a standalone contract.
The works are now available to collect. Existing collectors of my work are allowlisted, and new collectors may inquire to collect.
The Integrated Self. Paradiso Canto 29 of Sarah Zucker’s Divine Comedy.
The Light Witch
She shines her light into the darkness – among the shadows, images appear!
THE LIGHT WITCH is a signature VideoPainting I created in my studio in 2021. This is a self-portrait of an alter ego who has been a part of me for a long time.
I was born in December, the darkest month of the year. And yet, December is also the most festive time, as darkness provides a canvas for color and light.
The Light Witch embodies my unique gift for transmutation, and the call to project my rainbow visions into the world so that others may see them.
My “Electric Dream” on the SuperRare Monolith at Miami Art Week 2021
This gift is a form of magic, and I am its joyous channel. I creep around my cave doing a marvelous dance of image manifestation. I I I am the witch of the light!
The Light Witch was created with vintage Sony Video Painter, original animation and analog processing on VHS. Digitally transferred in 1080p, Single Edition. Minted on the Winter Solstice of 2021 – a pivotal moment in a pivotal year.
THE LIGHT WITCH was minted on SuperRare at 1pm ET / 10am PT on December 21, 2021.
It’s on Reserve Auction starting at 12Ξ. Click here to bid or view the token.
You Can Save This
Mimesis is the means by which culture flourishes!
2021 has been one of the most extraordinary years of my life. I’ve been a working artist for over a decade, largely without reward beyond the satisfaction of answering the call for expression within myself. This year, a confluence of events has led to my work being recognized on increasingly grand stages.
Not only am I grateful, but I am undeniably changed by the experience. I have spent this time steeped in the culture of our burgeoning community, as well as witnessing the pushback from those outside of it.
It’s only fitting, then, that I would end the year by debuting an artwork borne out of this feedback loop at Art Basel Miami – on my birthday, no less.
“You Can Save This” is a signature VideoThought – a statement with an open-ended context, visually manifested so as to allow for meaning to blossom.
I feel that one of my gifts as an artist is the ability to take ugly sentiments and transmute them into works that are transcendent and meaningful.
“You Can Save This” has become one of the rallying cries of those who reject NFTs. They believe that the ability to save and share our artwork is somehow proof that it does not hold value.
And yet, we who prize incorporeal art know that the ability to save and share it is a feature, and not a flaw. Its ability to network itself and spread is the very aspect which makes it valuable. We have a word for this, which we use also to describe the web-building tendencies of mycelium in the forest, or micro-organisms in a petri dish.
We call this “culture.”
And so, with this piece, I seek to alchemize this critique into a badge of honor. What we are doing here is a direct evolution of the human culture which has led us to this point. We are laying the groundwork for a new networked humanity.
As with most of my VideoThoughts, there are multiple interpretations. I don’t wish to squash the viewers’ experience by being overly prescriptive, but I do want to speak to an additional personal viewpoint.
Much has been made of the rapid growth of the NFT space, and its inevitable correlation with speculative finance. My feeling is that this will sort itself out, as it always does. My great hope, and intention, is that NFTs serve as a Trojan Horse, allowing for new digitally-native forms and voices to permeate mainstream consciousness.
The fiscal elevation of the artist class that we are experiencing is analogous to that of both the Renaissance and the Zombie Formalist movement – we get to determine whether we develop these markets around our aesthetics, or if we develop our aesthetics around the markets.
Ideally, the relationship between the collectors and the artists is one of glorious symbiosis – each plays a crucial role in the endeavor of the other. We risk losing the greater cultural meaning of this movement if we allow this dynamic to become unbalanced and favor only the desire for “number go up.”
And so, I see this piece as being both a statement of fact as well as a plea – You Can Save This. Decentralization affords us a degree of agency that’s new to us – we must reckon with the power of our will, and wield it with great responsibility.
The use of video feedback as a visual motif is central here, as it reflects the delicate paradox of intention we are all dancing with as we establish the nascent Metaverse.
I created this work in a rare 9:16 ratio specifically designed for IRL display. It will debut at The Gateway, the first large-scale presentation of Crypto Art at Art Basel Miami from NFTNow x Christie’s.
I was curated into the show by SuperRare, my OG and still most-used Crypto Art platform. I am putting the work on reserve auction there on December 2nd. Bids can be placed here.
