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.

Erik Benjamins (US) collects images of the sun and turns them into micro-poems. At EKWC, he made and translated a number of them into Dutch with plans to publish them in the Netherlands as a chapbook. Poetry aside, his main focus was continuing to develop a modular series of ceramic reflexology tiles – tiles with bumps to tread bare-footed – based on the idea that stimulating the soles of our feet positively influences the entire body. Inspired by Reflexology Walking Paths, a phenomenon common, but not specific to countries throughout Asia, these tiles are intended as art objects and design tools as well as a (pretty uncomfortable) investigation of our physical interaction with the world.