Everyday life is punctuated by ceramic vessels, often poured into and forth from with little consideration beyond their functionality. However, when broken, the vessel’s relationship to the user is shifted. While the vessel’s maker has an intimate understanding of ceramic’s integral relationship to breakage and loss, the day-to-day user has no such relationship, making the vessel’s destruction all the more shocking. By thinking about the broken vessels present within Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) and Azza El Siddique’s Measure of One (2020), this paper investigates the implications of intentional breakage, the materiality of clay and the evocative presence of the broken vessel in the museum.When placed within the context of the museum, the ceramic vessel becomes ascribed with meaning typically associated with sculpture while retaining its relationship to craft, the domestic sphere and archeology. The broken vessel can be contextualized as a reminder of death, understood through a metaphoric lens in relationship to bereavement, melancholy and transformation.