In a former chocolate factory in east London, curious forms are sprouting up all around Polish-born ceramicist Aneta Regel. While a throng of almost head-height towers is taking over the floor, shelves and surfaces are covered with smaller vessels. Some are cracked and craggy, others lumpen and rugged with chunks of stone pushing out from the clay. A white and crusty stack of a sculpture has handfuls of gravel stuck in the otherwise shiny glaze.
“This is made with porcelain, which we usually perceive to be so fine and delicate, but here it’s the opposite: it’s almost crumbling away or decomposing,” says Regel, whose solo show opens at Sarah Myerscough Gallery in London’s Mayfair on April 28. “I enjoy challenging the perception of ceramics as very finished and polished.”
It’s a sentiment shared among a growing group of contemporary ceramicists. From last year’s Armory Show art fair in New York to London’s PAD design fair and Collect craft fair, their creations tread the line between sort-of ugly and strangely beautiful. At the former, there were Finnish artist Emma Helle’s messy mishmashes of classical figurines as well as LA-based Brian Rochefort’s gloopy and garish vessels. In London, Anne-Laure Cano, Noa Chernichovsky, Akiko Hirai and Oriel Zinaburg all showed sculptural pieces that are distressed, disrupted and deconstructed, forgoing sinuous lines and smooth surfaces in favour of roughly hewn shapes and textures.
“My visual language is about the beauty that lies within the ugly,” says London-based Oriel Zinaburg, who worked as an architect before taking up ceramics in 2018. “I think that, subconsciously, my approach came from architectural concepts of deconstruction.” Clay is first pressed into moulds. “I take those pieces and tear them, bend them and distort them, then sort of collage them together,” says Zinaburg of his “ugly shapes”, which combine different types of clay and layers of glazes.
These textural finishes are not new, says Zinaburg. “They’ve been used for a long time, especially in Japanese ceramics, exploring the beauty of imperfection, of wabi-sabi.”
Today, this heritage is continued in Iga-shi, Japan, by Masaomi Yasunaga, who combines traditional ceramic techniques with the radical outlook of Sōdeisha, the “Crawling through Mud Association” founded in 1948 in Kyoto to oppose prevalent aesthetics in pottery. Yasunaga, who uses glaze instead of clay as his primary material, learnt from Satoru Hoshino, who was a member of Sōdeisha in the 1970s.
“I feel that recognising an uncertain concept of beauty through art is something that I can spend my life uncovering,” says Yasunaga, whose work is on show at Nonaka-Hill gallery in Los Angeles until May 20, as well as at Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts in Auburn, Alabama until May 7. The inspirations “have shifted from insect shells or bones to abandoned buildings or ruins — the product of mankind melding into nature”.
For Alex Logsdail, CEO of Lisson Gallery, which showed Yasunaga’s work in New York last year, “There’s a primal authenticity and rawness to his sculptures. You feel as if you are experiencing something that has been salvaged or unearthed.”
Regel uses both the word “unearthed” and “weathered” about her forms. “It’s like there is some strange history to them,” she says. Barcelona-based Anne-Laure Cano says that her stacking sculptures “look more like they have been found than made”.
As well as stoneware and porcelain, Cano incorporates materials such as plaster, sand and pieces of metal in a process of layering and transformation. Old pieces are broken and embedded in wet clay to create new sculptures.
“I fire them, and fire them again, creating cracks and torsions that, for me, reflect our experiences in life,” she says. But for all the mess in Cano’s work (at 155A Gallery in south London May 13-14 and 20-21), a palette of subtle shades gives them a delicate prettiness.
Other artists use more vibrant colour, such as LA-based Brian Rochefort, whose gloopy creations are on view at MassimoDeCarlo gallery in Beijing until April 23. His “Craters”, lava-spewing volcanic forms that combine glass with clay, are often inspired by Abstract Expressionist paintings, he says.
In Iowa, Andrew Casto’s porcelain assemblages combine marshmallow hues with gold lustre — the tropes of classical bone china, made messy and chaotic as roughly sculpted vessels with dense glazes. His practice is both “a material study of erosion and geological processes”, and an exploration of how “extant negative forces in our lives shape us physically, mentally and emotionally”, says Casto, who is part of a group show at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, opening June 10.
From her studio in Tel Aviv, Noa Chernichovsky refers to her sculptures as manifestations of “internal chaos”. Earthy surfaces are paired with jolting colours resembling bananas or tropical birds. At Collect fair, “people were attracted to the use of colour, but they would also take a step back,” she laughs.
“I just think her work is so unexpected,” says Simon Stewart, owner of London’s Charles Burnand Gallery, whose group show (Sub) Conscious Form, (until June 16), features Chernichovsky’s sculptures. “There’s so much joy in her use of colour, form and texture — but it does get a very Marmite response.” Stewart adds that while Chernichovsky’s work is now selling to major collectors, it isn’t always an instant hit. Seeing beauty in the imperfect and unconventional takes time.
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