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.
Strabismus
Strabismus is a series of 100 looping video artworks by Sarah Zucker handcrafted on VHS Tape.
The series is being released through a ranked auction powered by Highlight, running 24 hours from May 1st through May 2nd, 2024. The work is being editioned on Ethereum.
You can view the art and bid in the auction at strabismus.xyz
STRABISMUS ARTIST STATEMENT
“That’s 3D Art. Computers generate ‘em. BIG computers.”
Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld Season 6, Episode 6
I was born with a magic eye. Thanks to a condition known as “Strabismus,” my left eye marches very much to the beat of its own drum. You could say that it is “crossed,” but I like to think of it as a bit of a maverick.
Beyond a charming appearance, this has affected my vision my entire life. While most people perceive depth physically through the stereoscopic coordination of both eyes, I have adapted to calculate depth algorithmically in my mind. This often leads to double vision and the illusion of depth where there is none (and also causes me to bump into the furniture a lot when I’m tired).
Ironically, this made it impossible for me to perceive the images hidden in the “Magic Eye” series that became popular in my childhood (immortalized, of course, on a 1994 episode of Seinfeld.) The “unfocused” or “blurry” vision required to witness the illusion was my everyday reality, and I would give my tiny self a headache staring at those psychedelic color fields and willing them to take form.
It’s an experience that has stuck with me as I’ve developed my art practice working with computer graphics and analog video techniques. My new series, Strabismus, explores illusions of depth generated through digital video synthesis and analog time displacement.
Each work in the series aims to convey my own unique experience of depth – no crossed eyes required. I approached the creation of the work as a generative system, with my own personal optical algorithm and internal artistic feedback loop (a BIG computer) serving as the essential spice of randomness. The aesthetics emerged, no doubt, thanks to a year investigating and luxuriating in the work of Op Art pioneers like Bridget Riley, Yaacov Agam and Victor Vasarely.
This work evolved directly out of Temporale, my first long-form series editioned on the blockchain. Both projects distort the interlacing of analog video signal, where alternating bands of information yield motion. By directly manipulating this native aspect of the medium, I am able to weave together multiple timelines into a potent fusion of the temporal and the spatial.
Where Temporale channeled textural material video through this distortion to capture Time in a still image, Strabismus channels flat color motion through the distortion to conjure Depth out of Time.
I see each of these two series as independent yet undeniably related. I have always loved my own fluidity in moving between modes in my work, from the figurative to the abstract, the narrative to the expressionistic. But these two series reflect a new maturity, a desire to dig deeper and manifest my ideas on a greater scale than ever before. I remain as playful as ever, but am delighting in flexing my creative muscles.
Rhapsody in Hue
The bliss of all things moving in harmonious alignment. My favorite color has always been all of them all at once.
RHAPSODY IN HUE is a signature VideoFeeling crafted in my studio in 2021. It came together through a unique pairing of original video synthesis animation and video feedback technique with analog processing.
I have become increasingly aware of the nature of my VideoFeelings as a form of rhythmic sculpture that I create with light on videotape. They vibrate with tactility and possess a unique dimensionality despite being entirely incorporeal.
It’s no secret that I’m forever in love with rainbows. I have long said that my favorite color is all of them at once. Aside from their arrestingly beautiful aesthetic qualities they bear great mythological meaning. The rainbow signifies harmonious alignment and wholeness in both spiritual and scientific modes of thought.
I’ve been musing lately on the vibrant palettes I explore in my work, and how they’re only accessible through the RGB colorspace originated in Cathode Ray Tube Televisions. The emergence of NFT technology has encouraged widespread embrace and support for screen-based artworks in their natively luminous format without the need to dull their shine to fit into the material world.
This piece is a celebration of the dance we do between the physical and spirit realms as we wield our novel command of electric light.
RHAPSODY IN HUE was minted at 9am this morning as the genesis token on my new VideoFeelings contract provided by Manifold.
I’ll no longer be minting to the SR shared contract, which caps my existing 1/1s there. The use of my own contracts will allow for my ongoing series to exist as self-contained collections on OpenSea, while being aggregated seamlessly with my longstanding SuperRare profile. This should yield an optimized secondary market experience for my collectors – I’m quite dedicated to elegance, after all.
This piece will be making a special IRL emergence this month – more info on that when it can be revealed.
RHAPSODY IN HUE is now available on reserve auction on SuperRare.
PROMETHEA
Promethea – Open Edition Title Card
My new collection, “Promethea,” debuts on Nifty Gateway today at 6:30pm ET. I am immensely proud of the work, and the multi-layered meaning that channeled through me.
It is a story at once ancient and familiar: a musing on the mystical power technology has to lift us beyond the realm of the animal and into the divine.
The series – a triptych of VideoPaintings and a title card – is inspired by the myth of Prometheus. Regarded as the father of technology, his name means "foresight."
I love the old stories, because they remain widely accessible cultural touchstones. Their ubiquitousness allows much room for play.
My Promethea also plays with Fire – the OG technology. The advent of Fire marks the dawn of human civilization. It's the essence of catalysis – a liminal substance, both physical and incorporeal at once.
And yet, if not handled with expert care, Fire can burn down everything it helped to build. With great power comes great responsibility. But I feel much is made of this aspect lately – critique is the most facile form of expression, after all. And so, with my Promethea, I wish to lean into an unbridled vision of technology’s power for positive transformation.
Snatched – VideoPainting #1 from Promethea
In "Snatched", the 1st VideoPainting, I show Promethea as gaining access to the gods' reverie. Clever Promethea knows just where Zeus keeps his fire, and wastes no time in appropriating it.
Empowerment is self-bestowed upon those who do not fear to seize it.
Promethea’s Fire – VideoPainting #2 from Promethea
In "Promethea's Fire," the 2nd VideoPainting, our hero delights in wielding her will in the world. She brings back the fire to the human realm so that others may use it.
The great movements of progress are ignited by individuals acting out slivers of divine inspiration.
In the myth, much is made of the hero's suffering. The punishment for stealing fire is to be bound for eternity as an eagle eats his liver daily.
Such a drama queen!
I feel, in showing Promethea as a woman, the suffering is implied. We are, after all, bound to our bodies. Cyclical body horror is no stranger to us!
Unbound – VideoPainting #3 from Promethea
And so, in "Unbound," the final VideoPainting, I skip to my interpretation of a lesser told part of the myth.
This is a story of Techgnosis through personal revelation. The fire of the gods allows us to transcend the limits of our own bodies. We can become unbound!
There are layers hidden within the series. It's not my place to be prescriptive of your experience. I invite you to investigate them for yourself.
My hope is that curators will feel inspired to do their invaluable dance and place the work into context within its lineage.
"Promethea" was minted as erc721s on a standalone Manifold Studio contract (View the full collection on OpenSea), and will be sold through ranked auction and open edition on Nifty Gateway.
The ranked auctions start at 6:30pm ET and run to 8pm ET. The open edition is priced at $1370, and mints from 7-7:05pm ET.
View and Purchase the Promethea Title Card Open Edition here.
View and Bid on the Promethea Triptych Here.
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.
