Breaking the mould
Dynamic, experimental and thought-provoking, these female ceramicists have cast the wheel aside in favour of techniques that redefine traditional pottery. By Carli Philips.
Zhu Ohmu
Zhu Ohmu has come a long way since she first started making pots for her houseplants. Born in Taipei, the 34-year-old grew up in Auckland and has spent the past 12 years in Naarm/Melbourne. Now she’s heading off to Paris for a three-month residency — her first-time making art overseas. Ohmu has a degree in fine art but is self-taught in clay. She’s amassed a 40,000-strong social media following that’s hypnotised by her wonkily shaped vessels, their bulbous forms appearing on the verge of collapse.
Conceptually, her work explores the inversion of biomimicry: using clay to imitate the automaton of a 3D printer, but by hand. The intention, however, isn’t to make a carbon copy. “Forms emerge intuitively and the shapes are usually very organic and voluptuous,” she explains. Under the weight of the clay and often unexpected firing results, her pots transform and transpire into malleable forms, resulting in beautifully droopy, lopsided sculptures. Ohmu works from her home garage studio, busily bandaging coils one on top of the other, pushing the bulging vessels to their structural limits.
Ohmu’s work is mostly instinctive, with little pre-planning aside from the size of the base. Recently, however, she created her first public artwork, a process that involved extensive preparation. The project involved upscaling one of her pieces to human height and translating the ceramic to metal. The full-circle meta moment included using a 3D printer to scan and print one of her works that was originally inspired by 3D printing.
Kohl Tyler
New Zealand-born Kohl Tyler’s preference is to work slowly — practically, due to the delicacy of her medium, and ideologically, as an antidote to today’s fast-paced world. Based in Naarm/Melbourne for the past few years, the 31-year-old works from her home studio where she is surrounded by maquettes, glaze tests, books, seashells and plants.
Sometimes she sketches 3D forms in advance; other times, the process is more intuitive. “When I work on large-scale pieces that can reach up to a metre high, I’ll have a bit of a plan to at least structurally support the vessel. The base and bottom walls will be thick and taper off, becoming fine and delicate towards the sculpture’s extremities,” she says.
Tyler describes her visual language as “organic and nebulous”, drawing inspiration from plants, mushrooms and figures. Fascinated by notions of ecological grief, moments of natural phenomena and life’s ephemerality, she imagines her pieces as the possible inhabitants of a speculative future or remnants of a forgotten history.
Working with stoneware clay, Tyler uses a combination slab-coiling technique that enables her to build layer by layer. Everything is fired in the kiln above 1280 degrees to encourage a vitrification process, causing the work to shift and cascade with the heat. She also develops her own varieties of matte-white glazes, which give each piece a fossilised, bone-like quality.
The visual artist’s latest exhibition, “All is Ephemeral”, is an evocative series of forms in fluted, trumpeted shapes and profiles reminiscent of conches and coral. “They may feel familiar, as they’re inspired by the lifeforms of here and now,” says Tyler, “but as I think forward and backward in time they become more otherworldly.”
Emma Lindegaard
Ceramicist Emma Lindegaard dreams up her abstract objects in Walyalup/Fremantle where she’s endlessly inspired by the natural world and its “silent wisdom”. The 32-year-old says she is constantly drawn to waterside rock formations and natural structures. “They are the driving force of every day in the studio,” she says.
Lindegaard started working with clay only seven years ago but immediately fell in love with the medium. “I’d never had a daily practice before, and the routine and discipline brought a huge sense of purpose to my life.”
Lindegaard describes her sculptural forms as biomorphic, feminine, airy, ethereal and anthropomorphic. Mostly, she says, they are “of the earth”. Using predominantly stoneware clay as it’s robust and easy to work with, she depends on only minimal tools and the coiling method, a process that enables thoughtful modification of shape, texture and balance.
Given that it can take up to four weeks for the clay to harden and hold rather than slump, Lindegaard usually works on three pieces at a time. She says it also helps to avoid overworking them, and gives room for them to breathe so she can return later with fresh eyes and apply thoughtful modification.
Given their 3D composition, Lindegaard uses a wooden modelling tool to get into tight spaces and a needling tool that allows her to cut into the clay body to create negative space — the leading force in her practice. The result are minimalist pieces shaped in organic forms that she hopes project “stillness and ease”.
Lucile Sciallano
French-born Lucile Sciallano of Alterfact Studio specialises in 3D printing with clay. The process involves putting the clay in a cartridge and, under air pressure, waiting for a thin coil in the centre to form before the cartridge moves according to the pre-planned design, much like an “automatic piping bag”.
Sciallano mainly works with porcelain, adding coloured glazes to make the pieces watertight. The studio quashes pre-conceived ideas around achieving perfection with automation — the limitations and variables of clay as a medium mean that even with a 3D printer precision isn’t guaranteed. Alterfact Studio only produces in small batches and, even then, replicas aren’t always exact: there are errors in calculations, things collapse and nozzles wander off-kilter.
Sciallano, who has degrees in art and design from universities in France and the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven in Holland, is fascinated with ideas around “looseness and control”. Influenced by fabrics and textiles, Sciallano’s ceramic objects echo loops of thread and crumpled materials. In addition to making her own work, she hosts workshops that cover the two stages of the making process: digital design and clay printing. At the heart of it is a push and pull of the old and the new.
This is an extract from an article that appears in print in our thirteenth edition, Page 48 of Winning Magazine with the headline: “Breaking the mould”. Subscribe to Winning Magazine today.
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