Carmine Deganello
Carmine Deganello, Valveola
Carmine Deganello, Valveola
Valveola is a hanging ceramic lamp, with a changing shape as well as an adjustable height and beam of light. The underlying purpose of such a design is to consider the ceramic object as something that is suspended, lightweight and, above all, capable of creating a daily relationship with whoever uses it. In fact, the two reflecting panels (linked to each other by a small magnet) can be rotated to adjust the light beam and make them become two valves, that can be almost totally closed or open like two petals. Thus, Valveola moves in the space of the room where it is installed, changing its appearance, opening and closing itself, and using light to outline its environment.
Carmine Deganello
Paolo Deganello
Paolo Deganello, Geko 1
Paolo Deganello, Geko 2
Lamps have always had a mainly geometric shape: a hanging opal glass sphere containing a bulb, a reflecting painted aluminium hemi-sphere or a rod that starts from the centre of a square base to support a bulb with a truncated conic opal polycarbonate shield.
Today’s minimalists, like the rationalists and illuminists of the past, appreciate the statement by Galileo: “the universe is written in the language of mathematics and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometric shapes”. And so, respecting the laws of the universe, they reduce everything artificial to geometric figures, because the silent perfection of absolute geometry would seem to contain beauty. I prefer to seek forms that use Mother Nature’s construction logic. For me, today, it is more interesting to understand how a seed changes into the shape of a tree rather than to review the steps involved in transforming the iron, contained in a ferrous stone, into a square, rectangular or circular metal section…
I used the belly of a gecko (Tarentola Mauritanica) that eats mosquitoes and flies dazed by the electric light. I put an electric wire up through the tail to carry current to a cold-light bulb – that saves energy – located above its abdomen, engraved with an orange strip to give a warm reflection to the cold light. To shield the light, I protected it with a torn polycarbonate sheet by Bayer, because it resembles a wing and because some geckoes know how to fly.
Geky, genetic mutation of an electric wire into a flying ceramic lamp produces warm light and even flies. I created two versions – one decorated with the skin of Tarentola, and the other with white blue decorations from Albisola – but I would like to make others.
Paolo Deganello
Amie Dicke
Amie Dicke, Sugar Memory 1
Amie Dicke, Sugar Memory 2
For a while I wanted to focus on reproducing and remodeling a series of sculptures I made just before I graduated from art school in the year 2000. During that period I started to explore the position of women in everyday life and the way they perceive themselves in relation to their appearance in public. While trying to position myself both as an artist and as a woman, I observed other women. I was looking for a personal style or a unique attitude or stance and, quite literally, tried to obtain one by studying the positions and shapes of the female body.
While standing on the threshold of a professional career as an artist, I decided to use my own body to express this search for a distinguishable position. Like a statue, I made a pressing of my legs from crotch to foot in marzipan coated with icing. The soft substance echoed the negative curves of my body. The sculptures were smoothly molded and resulted in conical pillars of sugar, one broad and the other narrow. The latter one is veiled in deep pink icing. The broad one stands astride, luxuriating in the sugary substance of honey-like transparency that slides down its thigh. The two sculptures are entitled How sweet is the space between my legs. The sculptures proved to be more fragile than I expected them to be. The baker who helped me prepare this project promised that they would probably last for several years. But as soon as they were finished the marzipan surface started to split and fall apart.
The memory of the constantly changing, uncontrollable sugar sculptures made me realize that I wanted to make them again and this time preserve the beauty of the “fresh” image.
What will happen when I make the How sweet is the space between my legs sculptures again of a more endurable material? They won’t crumble apart like the marzipan and sugar, the new tension is that they can break. Fragility will stay, but they won’t be sweet anymore. I have to start this project with a new approach. My aim is to perfect the representation of the “space between the legs”.
Amie Dicke
Florence Doléac
Florence Doléac, Patate, urne funérarie familiale
Patate is a family’s funeral urn or, even better, the transfert of the superimpositions created in family tombs. In cemeteries, defunct families are arranged within small constructions, almost as if they were homes.
Here, the group of the deceased forms a large sprouting potato. Each sprout represents a member of the family. The assembly is a curious object that can be placed on the ground in the centre of the home.
This object completely plays down the language of mourning in a highly symbolic allegory.
The sprouts, children of the same stock, usually project toward the sky since they are attracted by the light.
The names will be engraved on each sprout.
Florence Doléac
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick, Multiple Revision Structure
Liam Gillick, Multiple Revision Structure
Liam Gillick, Multiple Revision Structure
A sequence of simple glazed ceramic forms. Each element is intended to be combined with at least one other element. The colours may be the same or mixed. The resulting work is intended to be both functional and aesthetic. It can be used for all the things that a plate can be used for. It may also be displayed or combined with small works by other artists. It is hard to make this simple form, yet its place in the world should pass with little comment.
Liam Gillick
Stefano Giovannoni
Stefano Giovannoni, Lullaby
The project developed by Giovannoni is based on the idea of redesigning a chalice from the 1500s, as reproduced in the book Glassography Book Two by Giovanni Maggi. Re-inventing the glass, Giovannoni relates the banality of the object with the intense sentimental value evoked in him by the book from which it originates, and given to him in 1989 by his maestro, Remo Buti, with the dedication: “Beautiful copy!”.
Using ceramic once again, a material that, according to Giovannoni, is sometimes more flexible than even the most widely used plastic, the designer stratifies his experimentation of the concept of a vase over time, achieving a synthesis of memory and contemporaneousness that he describes as follows: “Although the vase is one of the world’s oldest objects, it can be re-invented through concepts in which morphology is in any case the expression of a construction technique”.
Martì Guixé
Martì Guixé, Ceramic Snow Ball
It is a ceramic piece that you put inside your toilet water tank and helps you and your environment to save water.
How do you save water?
Because the volume of water is occupied by the ceramic snow ball.
Why in the shape of a snow ball?
Because snow is water in a volumetric shape, and it is white like standard bath ceramic.
A graphic sequence explaining how to use it is shown on the piece.
Martì Guixé
Pekka Harni
Pekka Harni, Pilons
Artwork is often composed of many elements. Mainly, these elements are fixed together in the final order.
We are not allowed to change the order of its elements; after the work is finished, it is ready and final.
In my installation, I wanted to turn this fact upside down. I created 12 simple ceramic elements in vase-like shapes, made of red clay. All these elements can be combined in various orders to create different pylon compositions. The user, or owner, of this artwork is allowed to change the order of this pylon composition, to renew the work. These pylons are interactive, at least theoretically.
Because of my profession as an architect and industrial designer I am used to applying function to artefacts and I am almost unable to create pure artwork, without any side-functional or utilitarian aspects. Function does not eliminate the art, although art mainly eliminates or transforms the function.
All the ceramic elements used for my pylon compositions are traditional and very useful pot-like shapes, but also modular. It was also a natural solution to use a local ceramic master, red clay and traditional working methods to create these pylon elements. It was a great experience working with a skilful ceramic master, Marco Tortarolo, from Albisola.
In old times, food was often stored in ceramic containers, like vases and pots.
A stomach: an organ resembling a sac in which food is mixed and partially digested is also a container.
I associate these different pylon shapes to some stomach problems, when we eat too much food.
Allegoric to the digestion problems, it can be understood as an expression of our present society, which is consuming, eating, and using much too much of the planet Earth’s resources.
And finally, I would like to re-functionalise these ceramic pylons by making a water fountain out of these pylons in some nice Italian garden.
Pekka Harni
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