The Beautiful Act

CRA
JP
2023

Porcelain
V. Sz.

Ornament as Ecological Gesture

In January 2023, I was able to spend three months in Arita as part of the Creative Residency Arita and realise a series of porcelain ware with Riso Porcelain.
While studying the history of porcelain production in Arita, as a preparation, I noticed – not very surprisingly – the four hundred years of persistent use of blue Gosu on white porcelain: I realised that, if I wished to approach the essence of Arita porcelain and wanted to make full use of the local craftsmen skills – I would not get around decorating my utilitarian objects.
This thought simultaneously provoked deep discomfort but also great curiosity within me. I felt uncomfortable because I had never worked with ornamentation before – I had never learned to do so. On the contrary, I had learned, that ornamentation was – at best – useless.
However, this ambivalent feeling – all those craftsmen couldn’t have been wrong after all – tempted me to study in depth roughly 15‘000 years of ceramic history and its continuing use of decoration. Encouraged by a thought of Soetsu Yanagi, who wrote in his book The Unknown Craftsman, that a society without patterns cannot have a relationship with or understanding for nature, I came to the realization that these symbols are not solely beautiful but also have a distinct cultural function – embodying their respective worldview and conveying behavioral rules therein. In the present context – the loss of the symbol and the concomitant loss of the living, in other words water scarcity, declining biodiversity, species extinction which further the environmental crisis – an exploration on the origin and function of symbols, seemed significant.
I decided to focus on the spiral during my research, with the idea of the spiral as a primal and universal pattern, appearing in prehistoric times in several or all regions and cultures of the world around similar moments: as an intuitive description of their environment respectively the cosmos – as an illustration of cyclic life, movement and growth or as an unconscious representation of galaxies, fluids and our DNA.

Exhibition, Nov 17th to Dec 3rd 2023 at (place) by Method in Tokyo.
Catalogue published by the Swiss Embassy in Japan, 2024.

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