Franzis Engels Gallery

Modern and Contemporary Art, Porcelain and Ceramics, Sculpture

description

Clay, wheel throwing, 'centuries old'... is the concept 'an sich'.
The source is a series of forms thrown on the potters wheel. The plastic wall of the still wet and soft pot is deformable with hand an fingers with fine and strong movements. The clay itself, this matter, is the core of inspiration. 
Twisted and deformed pot parts, volume, skin, texture and colour all this is assembled into a whole. Unique anthropomorphic sculptures emerge, which, starting from the form, make the sen-sory and narrative imagination tangible.
Technical: This ceramic vessel began as a wheel-thrown pot and was pinched, folded, gathered, ruffled and distended— these gestural motions, often associated with fabric, make the clay billow and waft like something far lighter than stoneware. The pots, after they have been thrown and dried to various degrees, are warped and sculpted into abstract pots, and glazed with an airbrush-ing technique to achieve nuanced and seamless color gradations. This practice, rather than focus-ing on building vessels, approaches the vessel as the unit with which to build a claysculpture.
Conceptual: The origin of these works stems from a desire to test the technical limitations of the wheel-thrown vessel. The lip, boundary and barrier between interior and exterior, becomes a site for dissection and extension, ad infinitum. Though pottery is often related to the human body, through words like feet and shoulders, this work just as well relates to vegetation, coral, clouds, and topography; a nebulous, airy pot reimagines the surface, form, and meaning of a ‘vessel’ as not only a frame for an interior void, but as a frame for its own exterior surroundings, and even itself. 

AnneMarie Laureys (Beveren Waas 1962 - )

Forbidden squeeze

Ceramics, 37 x 22 x 15 cm.

Contact

Franzis Engels Gallery

www.franzisengels.nl