In the PROFILES section: Five ceramic artists from Korea,, Netherlands / Slovenia, Belgium, China, Switzerland. Coverage of EXHIBITIONS and EVENTS in India, China, France, France / Belgiu, Germany, USA . In the section ARTIST JOURNAL, we present ing Huang and Kim Simonsson. And we also have interviews with artists IN STUDIO as well as listings of Dates, Courses, Seminars and Markets.
NEWS
PROFILES
Huh, Sang Wook – Korea
Ruth Korthof – Netherlands / Slovenia
Fabienne Withofs – Belgium
Haoyu Wu – China
Claudia von Boch – Switzerland
Gabriele Nocker – Germany
EXHIBITIONS / EVENTS
Indian Triennial – New-Delhi – India
Baoku Jiangxin Art Center – Shanghai – China
2nd Mirabilia Biennale – Lyon – France
Sophie Ronse – Saint-Jans-Cappel – France / Belgium
Laurent Petit / Benoît Pouplard – Siegburg – Germany
NCECA – Richmond – USA
Ceramics Fair – Oldenburg – Germany
Balkan Journey II – Bucharest, Horezu, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo – Europe
BOOKS
New literature
ARTIST JOURNAL
Jing Huang (China) and Kim Simonsson (Finland) – Ting-Ju Shao
IN STUDIO
Carol Sinclair – Evelyne Schoenmann – Interview / Developing Skills
DATES / Exhibitions / Galleries / Museums
COURSES / SEMINARS / MARKETS
ADVERTISEMENTS
PREVIEW
Stories in Art
Beautiful things are all around us. We, as people, are attracted to beautiful things. You see it, I see it, we all do. But it’s not just a world of beauty we live in, there is pain too. Whether large or small scale – a countries’ conflict or my inner pain – we can’t get around it. There is no escape from the struggles in life. I call it brokenness, and one of my favourite things in life is to find beauty from brokenness.
To create beauty from brokenness.
This started years ago. The old trash-bin got wheels and diamond studs. A lamp got a new life with some plaster, a brooch from my grandmother and shiny bling.
When I inherited sixty-four 🙂 encyclopaedias from my father, I made a table out of them (who still reads encyclopaedias?). Broken plates, a few charms and a teacup become a memorable serving-dish in my hands. Used Nespresso cups are turned into a table lamp and plastic bottles become a flower vase.
Ruth Korthof
An artist of balance and exploration
Fabienne Withofs is an aligned and rigorous visual artist who embraces the world, seamlessly shifting between various genres, unfiltered, and consistently on a serene journey. Her sculptural work reflects a personality deeply committed to understanding reality through clay. She structures, deconstructs, and reconstructs it until pushing the balance of material and craft boundaries, all while maintaining an unrestricted discourse. With clay as her medium, she possesses a tool that mirrors her essence, capable of evoking emotions, prompting exploration, caricaturing, and captivating her audience. However, it is only when she presents her works alongside her drawings, paintings, engravings or jewellery that one can truly begin to fathom the depth of the universe that inspires her.
Her recent work unveils her artistic facets, amalgamating 40 years of research into an aesthetic that is both introspective and transgressive. For instance, she forges unusual connections by melding a canvas artwork with a ceramic piece to craft a mixed-media sculpture, or by enveloping a stoneware piece with paper.
She fosters surprise and, as always, renders the creative process transparent without regard for conventions. This career leitmotif manifests itself in various forms influenced by her impulses, encounters or travels.
“What is artwork if not the establishment of a process that transcends our connection to the world?” – Fabienne Withofs, 2007
(Cédric Piechowski)
Fabienne Withofs
Natural Form and Art Recreation
New Stoneware: The Path of Ceramic Art Creation
Personal Art Experience and Exploration
I was introduced to ceramic art in college and decided to devote myself to this creation with infinite possibilities. Ceramic art has unique artistic characteristics. The in-depth exploration from material technology to moulding technology is an extremely long process, involving a wide range of knowledge.
In 2008, I created the Encounter series of ceramic works. In this series of works, I focused more on how to break inherent thinking, quickly and freely “doodling” in a state of no theme or content, finding pure forms in many interlaced lines, and trying to use speed to reduce my thinking about the work itself. I once wrote, “In recent years, I try not to think and stay alone in the void, trying to forget the inherent ideology of the past, and even forgetting the material and ceramic creation itself, searching for an instinct to create with passion, slowly presenting my subconscious, from thoughtful to unthinking, from problematic to untitled, from tangible to intangible, and the final form can be said to be intentional arrangement with unintentional result.”
Wu Haoyu
Material and Form: People and Stories
Saw your huge, beautiful work 2 years ago at Nyon. How did you start with ceramics?
Born in Canada in 1957, I discovered ceramics in Argentina at the age of 10 and where I lived for 23 years. When I was 10 years old my parents visited a friend, an Argentine ceramicist. Visiting her studio was a real eye opener and I felt an immediate connection to clay. Ever since, I have been delving into ceramics. It is something that comes naturally to me.
First it was a hobby, but I then became autodidact – taking ceramic courses, learning technology and wheel throwing with Argentine ceramicists (Jorge Basile, Guillermo Mané). In 1990 I moved to Switzerland with my family. It was only after arriving in Switzerland in 1990 that I aimed to become a professional ceramicist.
After a year at Céruleum Visual Arts School of Lausanne (1994-95) I obtained a bachelor’s degree in ceramics from the Applied Arts School of Vevey (1995-99). For 25 years I taught ceramics to adults and children all the while developing my own creations in my studio that have been exhibited in Switzerland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Croatia, US and Canada.
Over the years I have continued with postgraduate courses in paperclay (Barbara Wagner), mould-making (Sasha Wardel, Séverine Emery-Jacquier, Francois Lemaire), calligraphy (Claire Mosnier, Denise Lach), and porcelain in Jingdezhen.
As of 2019 I stopped teaching although I continue to do occasional workshops in raku, mould-making, kintsugi. Currently I share my time between a studio in Switzerland and a second studio in the Piemont, Italy.
(Monika Gass)
Claudia von Boch
Damaged Spaces
Various groups of works run through Gabriele Nocker’s art ceramic œuvre. I was always impressed by their artistic stringency and diversity. What her works have in common is a precise formal idiom, firing using the raku or smoke firing process and often the combination of her ceramic objects with other materials – metal, stone or sometimes wood. These are mostly found objects, objets trouvés, which – carelessly thrown away and now worthless – no longer have any function and appear like relics of a past that has become inaccessible. They are now given a new place in the artist’s works by transposing them into a different context of meaning. Removed from their original functional environment, the found objects acquire a new function or non-function in art.
“I find the tension between different materials such as metal and clay to be a source of possibilities for expression that surprise me. My experience is that material combinations make the characteristics of the different materials stand out more clearly. And somehow this creates a strange, enigmatic energy,” says Nocker. In a playful way, via a kind of seduction through the material, these different forms seem to find each other and ultimately combine to form a unifiedwork. The object appears almost like a genetic principle: hybrid, métissage, crossbreeding.
(Martin Oswald)
Gabriele Nocker
In early April 2024, Lyon issued an invitation to the 2nd biennale, Mirabilia Lyon. The event took place high above the rooftops of the former silk city in the immediate vicinity of the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière.
In the recently renovated Carré with its glass roof, the sky bathed the works on display in a light-flooded ambience.
Mirabilia is the fruit of a group of art-loving friends who have set themselves the goal of creating a platform for artists from various disciplines to present their works.
After successful applications, 32 artists and craftspeople were invited to the 3 1/2 day event, which took place at the same time as the European Craft Days. The guest country was Portugal. The young Portuguese artist Eneida Lombes Tavares was invited and was represented with her works, a combination of earthenware and traditional basket weaving.
The works and techniques of the exhibiting ceramists could not have been more different.
Dominique Stutz’s objects seemed to come directly from an alien universe. Amorphous hybrid forms shone out in many colour compositions. The surfaces told stories of alien universes. Bursting – bubbling up – flowing – dripping – scale-like – small and large layers overlapping like crusts enveloped the objects. The artist creates the playful soft shapes using a variety of techniques. All the glazes are created in her own studio. Dominique Stutz is inspired by looking through the electronic microscope, after the teachings of Ernst Hackel.
Esti Reich
Contemporary French Ceramics
Exhibition at the Stadtmuseum Siegburg
In this year’s Siegburg exhibition on contemporary ceramics, the artworks of two artists from France who break with the traditional techniques of ceramic production are featured. Both take their orientation from nature – Laurent Petit from the earth, trees and plants; Benoît Pouplard from water and ice. Both work with fractures, cracks, folding and fusion. Both use moulds, but in very different ways. Each in their own way, they are looking for a means of expression for the dialectic of growth and transience, the transformation of matter, chaos and order, and the vulnerability of creation. Despite these analogies in their work, they both speak a very authentic language of their own.
Laurent Petit draws inspiration from history, mythology, archaeology and nature to create works that are both sculptural and painterly. Since 2018 he has developed three families of works: Mythologies, loosely based on the stories of the ancient Greeks; Vestiges, carved blocks, enigmatically enshrouded; and Élégances du chaos, which combine chaotic forms with more geometric grid structures. Forms, materials and colours of his works demonstrate his interest in narrating history, memory and what remains of the past.
Benoît Pouplard is fascinated by water and ice, by the power and force of their structure and their change over the millennia, and what he calls the “choreography of glacial chaos”. It is very important to him to “capture the soul of the north in his works, to document a changing world, molten matter that erupts under the fracturing of the glacier.”
(Gundula Caspary)
Laurent Petit, Le crépuscule du bol – n°2, 24.5 x 66 x 36 cm, detail
Jing Huang – China
Jing Huang (1989), born in Guilin, graduated from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in the USA.
Regarding the three major elements in her work – clouds, mountains, and water – Huang finds it challenging to sculpt water. ”The melting glaze flowing down naturally in response to the topography and gravity, likening water, is not drawn in ink painting but expressed through the use of empty spaces; these glazes capture the spirit of water rather than its physical form.”
Kim Simonsson – Finland
After graduating from the College of Arts at Aalto University, Kim Simonsson (born 1974) participated in an artist-in-residence programme in Canada. He gained a preliminary understanding of My Lonesome Cowboy and Japanese manga and anime after attending the speech given by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Impressed by Murakami’s straightforward approach, Simonsson later created a series of spitting girls, with the saliva portion made of glass. He was honoured as the 2004 Finnish Emergent Artist, a prestigious award in Finland that helped him gain recognition in the Finnish art world.
(Ting-Ju SHAO)
Jing Huang – China
Kim Simonsson – Finland
Carol, let’s start with your biography and your professional career.
I’ve been running my ceramics studio for thirty-three years and have a ceramics degree from Grays School of Art in Aberdeen. I ran my tile studio in Edinburgh for 12 years and also had a gallery for 3 years. For the last 20 years I have combined my making with project and advisory work, and really enjoy this balance of activities. Now I work as a ceramic artist creating one-off pieces for exhibitions and projects.
You combine your ceramics practice with your work in arts and business consultancy. Can you elaborate?
About 20 years ago I was invited to give a talk about my studio practice and it made me realize how much I had learned and that perhaps I could share some of that experience. I worked as a freelancer with a range of wonderful organizations and it is such a joy and a privilege to work with people from all creative disciplines. It really helps me understand what drives us, the challenges and the rewards.
(Evelyne Schoenmann)
In Studio with Carol Sinclair
