Bram van Leeuwenstein |1

In his quest for the thinnest, most transparent porcelain possible, Bram van Leeuwenstein (NL) spent three months at EKWC researching the tension between thinness and preventing deformation. He cast a plaster casting mold from a 3D-printed PLA mold for a light-object. After casting in Bone China, he worked on the object’s skin. He created new structures and layers by carving, etching, and sponging until he reached the desired translucency. Each lamp is unique in texture, painting, and glaze effects.

Maartje Korstanje |2

The residents of the De Heeze quarter in Apeldoorn were looking for an artwork to adorn their public space, preferably a tall sculpture related to nature and social cohesion. They selected a design by Maartje Korstanje: a group of five sculptures inspired by the characteristic head of the morel. In an open space surrounded by roads, a service flat and a vegetable garden, the sculptures visualise the connections among people in the neighbourhood. After all, mushrooms are not solitary organisms but the fruiting bodies of an elaborate underground network of fungal mycelia. Korstanje was in Oisterwijk during the winter, when large works need much longer to dry, so she had less time to build them. This forced spontaneity only added to the organic look of the sculptures that were installed last September, to acclaim of the residents of De Heeze.

Koos Buster Stroucken

An ATM machine, cleaning utensils, cigarette buds, a water cooler; the subject matter of Koos Buster’s (NL) ceramics may seem a bit trivial at times, but there is definitely a logic to them. Buster has a soft spot for things that go unnoticed or are about to disappear. Reproducing them in a durable medium like ceramics gives them an aura of importance and a much longer lease on life. He also likes to create things that make people happy, and somehow, this is the exact result his intentionally ham-handed sculptures have. Meanwhile, it takes quite a lot of skill to make things look this clumsy.

Mariska Koolen

Mariska Koolen (NL) came to the EKWC to search for ways to dig deeper into a secretive world, and how to represent its hidden structures. During her residency, she created reliefs from red-firing clay, which she describes as ritual paintings. She wanted to open up the surface, almost as if she was operating on the object she was working on, exposing repressed color and form. A ritual process bridging the outer world and inner processes. Koolen press-molded the tiles with burlap as reinforcement. She used oxides as underglazes to create a rich depth in color and experimented with contrasting matt and glossy glazes.

Mariëlle van den Bergh |4

Throughout her career, Dutch artist Mariëlle van den Bergh has been paying homage to the primordial force and the beauty of nature, in paper, glass, textile, steel and ceramics. During this year’s residency, her fifth at EKWC, she worked through the intense impressions of a stay in Iceland with its marvellous landscape shaped by immense forces deep beneath the surface, by wind, snow, ice, melting water. In her ceramics you can see boiling mud, lava streams, mosses and other small plants clinging to bare rock, pebbles lining a rivulet bed. To evoke the eruptive nature of molten stone, van den Bergh worked with foam porcelain and other materials that were as unpredictable as Icelandic volcanoes, embracing the cracks and boils that formed in the kiln. EKWC staff did insist on protective measures, and no kilns were damaged in the process.
Currently van den Bergh is focusing on the influence human behaviour has on the environment.

Maaike Kramer

In the first two weeks of the residency, Maaike Kramer (NL), gave herself “playtime”. Discovering the material, making mistakes, responding to what the material can and cannot do, and how to follow it. The final piece stemming from this playtime became a mental space, a setting for thought. It shows the contradistinction between the inside salvaged mental world required for play, and the outside world it is presented in. Kramer combined different types of clay with different shrinking coefficients and firing temperatures, asking them to work together. All pieces were hand built and a celadon glaze was chosen for its long and strong historical connotations.

Manita Kieft |2

In recent years Manita Kieft (NL) has gotten more and more concerned with alarming current events, such as floodings, bushfires, earthquakes, and war, inevitably intruding her life through the daily news. During the covid lockdown, Kieft build her own library of photos taken from television screens showing grim images of disasters. She chose ceramics for its long history as (political) message bearers, which can stand the test of time and are still found in excavations today. At the EKWC Kieft focused on the field of tension of the transformation from photo to form, from 2- to 3-dimensionality, and how the images relate to not only the shape but also to the glaze application. Kieft used plaster casting molds, Styrofoam press-in-molds, and 3d printing techniques. The images were transferred using decals.

Mirthe Klück

Painter Mirthe Klück (NL) is driven by a deep curiosity about how materials work together, respond to each other, and give meaning to the work. During a trip to Japan and the ceramic villages Karatsu and Hagi, coming across their non-figurative, abstract approach to glazing, she recognized overlaps with her own work. Klück – intrigued by physics and transformation – wanted to learn how the clay and glaze particles react to each other to create color. The shapes she chose function mainly as carriers for the glazes but also refer to candy that often also has a seductive, glossy surface and intriguing sculptural qualities. In her gum-sculptures, she let her teeth create the sculptures by chewing on gum, which were then 3d scanned and digitally translated into molds.

Erno Langenberg |2

3D-printing with clay remains an experimental field, where Erno Langenberg feels right at home. Last October, he joined EKWC’s Sander Alblas to address a common problem in printing with normal clay pressed through a nozzle: you constantly need to change the cartridges. The solution? Use slip clay from a large container, add a substance to speed up coagulation – and start experimenting until you get it right. Erno also investigated ways to print with locally sourced clay that doesn’t have the consistent qualities of industrial clay bodies, by incorporating things like different shrinkage and deformation into the design of his building elements.