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.