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.

Frouke Wiarda

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.

Timon Hagen

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.

Coralie Vogelaar

Boris van Berkum |6

Boris van Berkum |5

Isolde Venrooy