Jaclyn Mednicov

It’s a well-known technique: pressing plants or flowers in clay, highlighting the delicate petals, leaves, stems. The results will usually be pretty, poetic, not much more, but the way American artist Jaclyn Mednicov went about it during her EKWC residency – that’s a different story. The imprints of the plants are just that much deeper, the stems cutting into the clay, leaving tears, gaps; sometimes the vessels or cylinders break. The flowers from the press moulds are so pronounced, the reliefs so tangible; a black oxide glaze gives some of the pieces a fossilised appearance, opening up vast spaces of time. The work itself is physical: kneading, pressing, trying to keep things together. Even the white porcelain cylinders have something raw about them. Together with the transience of nature, Mednicov has captured a deeper need to hold on to something precious. Death is nearby – and so is intense beauty.

Pei-Hsuan Wang |2

Pei-Hsuan Wang made a series of fascinating sculptures in homage of the women in her life. Her grandmother, who supported the family in Taiwan selling fruits from her orchard; her mother who migrated to America to start a new life; her close-knit group of aunties. They appear as if from myths and folktales, glazed in green, amber and white, the colours of Sancai burial objects of the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Today, Sancai pieces are sought-after artifacts linked directly to China’s venerable past. To Wang, who grew up in different cultures, questions of heritage are part of wider stories she explores through her art. Huddled Mass (Tree of Aunties), for instance, evokes the Chinese myth of Nüwa, the goddess who shaped humanity from clay. A desire to belong blends with the moment of creation; Nüwa’s serpent body intertwines with figures and creatures that allude to members of the artist’s family.

Ruta Butkute

Ceramics isn’t as unpredictable as people tend to think. Systematic testing, careful measurements, detailed records and technical expertise can go a long way to obtain consistent results. But not all artists are after consistency. During her EKWC residency, Ruta Butkute refused to be contained by rules, trusting her instinct instead to test the material to its limits. She poured liquid porcelain of various colours onto circular and rectangle slabs to create a smooth, marbled plane of frozen movement. Given the limited time casting slip remains fluid, Butkute had to work really fast in frantic dialogue with the porcelain, constantly responding to it in a physical, performative process. It resulted in a series of fragments from a larger universe, cold yet full of life, where each work is still a world in itself. Occasional cracks reveal tensions and imperfections, casually hinting at some unknown dimension beyond the impenetrable surface.

Madeline Stillwell

Carlos Monleon |2

Yujin Joung (DAE)

South Korea’s younger generations are struggling with impossible demands from society, that severely impact their well-being. Designer Yujin Joung investigated this obsession with perfection within her own family, tracing it to her grandmother’s trauma from Japanese colonial rule. She passed a desire for safety on to Joung’s mother, who grew up in poverty and stressed the importance of success for her daughter to obtain security. At EKWC, Joung press-moulded two enormous vessels based on Korean moon jars, praised for their ‘beautiful imperfections’. The fragile porcelain walls of the jars cracked when she opened the moulds, and each time she tried to mend them, they still continued to fissure and break under their own weight. To Joung, this is symbolic of life’s uncertainties and imperfections: there will always be cracks, no matter how hard you strive. Might as well accept them, and move on.

Martin Ayala Chavez (DAE)

Tin Ayala graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven with his Cholonisation project, that offers a platform to Cholo artists, musicians and performers. In former Spanish colonies of South America, Cholo used to be a derogatory term for people of mixed – indigenous and Spanish – heritage, but it has become a proud sobriquet for people who embrace the eclectic popular urban culture of the Andean states, as Ayala does. During his EKWC residency, he made two series of stirrup spout vessels that reference pre-Columbian ceramics. One consists of two gold-lustred ceremonial jugs representing potatoes and maize; the indigenous American crops that have become staple foods across the world. The second is made up of ten jugs in the forms of various Pokémon, as a critical reflection on the game’s premiss of environmental exploitation.

Harry Hachmeister

Cats are the most body-positive animals imaginable, says photographer, painter and sculptor Harry Hachmeister about the flat feline creatures that populate his work. Body image connects the cats to another constant in Hachmeister’s energetic, humourful and sensitive universe: the kettlebells. Counter-balancing the corporate seriousness of the gym, the weights point to transformation and the numerous reasons people want to change their appearance, while increasingly taking on anthropomorphic traits themselves. Hachmeister, who loves the physicality of clay, was in a happy place at EKWC. He learned to make his own glazes and allowed the natural colour of the clay to surface as well. Inspired by a research trip to California that also took him to Joshua Tree, he explored new forms to express intimacy, found, oddly enough, in cactuses and rocks. In the meantime, even the dreamy cats seem to turn into painterly landscapes.

Marieke Coppens

If clay were a language, Marieke Coppens was an analphabetic. In preparation of her EKWC residency the artist and guru learned Hittite, an extinct language written in cuneiform script on clay tablets. In this light, it only made sense for her to use the Pollard script, an alphabet developed for an unwritten Southeast Asian language, to decorate her works. These include an imperfect infinite circle and an imperfect infinite square, made up of tiles embossed with fluorescent signs that emit an otherworldly glow in the dark. The mosaics don’t communicate a specific message; the signs and tiles form an endless pattern of repetition and difference. Coppens made the signs mixing fluorescent pigments with Egyptian paste, a self-glazing mass fired at low temperatures. To offset her carbon footprint, the artist worked as a volunteer planting trees (@meerbomen.nu) for at least 29 hours, which equals 10% of her total EKWC budget.

Chen Yu Chen