By means of an origami-inspired folding technique, the nascent flower, still only a bud, defolds in three frozen moments, to ultimately form the calyx of a blossoming flower. In this third moment of the growing process, the flower almost reaches back the form from which it originally/technically sprang, the hemisphere, thus being at the same time the first and the last invisible moment.
This installation, called “Moments of Growth”, has deliberately been kept simple, free from any additional decoration or glaze in order to emphasize the purity of the form and to preserve the natural colour of the clay.
First prize at the “6th International Biannual of Ceramics” of the City of Kapfenberg (Austria)
Cutting to recompose: at every stage, this threefold reshaping of the hemisphere suggests a growing tension between the restructured object and the perception of spatial capacity, steeped in the interplay between its paper-thin delicacy and the crude aesthetics of the raw earth.
Three simple but deep incisions, cutting as far as is physically possible into such thin sheets of clay, distance the bowls from the perfect simplicity of the hemisphere.
And while the cuts are straight, they are warped, bending and curving, to the convexity of the bowl. The geometric placing of these incisions dictates the guiding outlines of the resulting shape. In the first bowl, the three cuts are spaced at regular distances along the circumference of the circle, starting from the points of an equilateral triangle.
On the second bowl, the hypotenuse of the triangle forms the very diameter of the circle. Put simply, the first two cuts divide the bowl into two, while the third splits the semi-circle into two quarters. The last bowl leaves two thirds of the circumference untouched; the three cuts are confined to the arc of the remaining third. The resulting isosceles triangle becomes minute.
In this final, highly off-centre stage, the circle – or by virtue of the three-dimensional complexity rather the hemisphere – seems to take on a crosswise aspect, illicit in its defiance of geometry and thus an outcast.