Alignment - my ceramic collection

These cups and saucers have accompanied me on a long, yearlong journey of finishing school, moving countries, starting my brand and most importantly, a journey of learning how to set and stand by boundaries.

I didn't see it in the moment, I just had a urge to divide these pieces visually, a craving for lines, for each colour to have its own compartment. Now I understand it is because I myself was craving drawing such lines in emotional and social connections. And I did. I cut people out of my life, explained calmly to them why, and left. 

THE SHAPE

These pieces are all wheel thrown and pushed and pulled into having a square rim. The angles are soft and the curves are irregular. They are both square and round, reminiscent of Vitruvius' ideals and standards. Buildings should be modeled after the human body which fits in both a cricle and a square, simutaneously (as demonstrated by Da Vinci's famous Vitruvius Man sketch. I loved that sketch so much I had a tote bag with it printed on when I was 15). I streched the cups right as I cut the off the wheel, when they were still very wet, and they would dry very angular, and in the kiln, everything melts, and they gained back their roudness. These pieces are the inheritors of my ponderings on the androgyny of my ceramic practice.

I did my first ceramics market in the spring of 2025, at school. I was working a lot with different tones of clay and melting glazes, with clean and polished surfaces. And my little heart with an 'e'. And anytime anyone would get something I would write down who they were, as I was looking for my demographic, who is interested in my pieces? Middle aged lady in gorgeous floral dress, dutch debate team member, 10 year old kid who thought my cup looked like a planet, coffee barista with big beard, kind lady who manages all the keys. There was no pattern, but I saw that anytime a heterosexual couple would approach my stand, the man would look away. Uninterested. Why? 

Are my ceramics not manly enough? Are they too girly because they're pink?! Is that it? Why won't you even look at them? 

Once the self doubt passed, I was left with a reflection on how much of myself permeates through my ceramics. Can you tell my gender through my work? I felt weird about it and wanted to make work that plays with this tension, I want my work to be androgynous. So I started playing with clay and ended up with these modified shapes, both round and square yet neither, they become their own category.

THE LINES

I have had the urge to draw thick lines across all of my work for the past few years. I feel like could do a whole article about just that, lines. Their aesthetic appeal, graphic qualities, visual meanings... I love lines, stripes. The first ceramic plate I ever made I filled pages in my sketchbook trying to plan how to glaze it. Big, thick lines, asymmetric, off centered, running across, splitting, yet being contained and restrained to the plate. They cannot actually run away. But I can.

They are bold, straight, yet their ends conform to the curves of the plate. In the end, I didn't feel so bold with my first ceramic plate, I did a line that closed back onto itself, along the rim. A circle if you will. With the moon cycles inside of it. And I like this line, with no beginning and no end, perpetually evolving back to its own finality.  And I made more pieces like this, one of them was a banana bowl. Another one I use for Tzatziki, it is blue with a green stripe. And there is one, a very special one, that I knew was going to mean a lot. When it came out of the kiln, I sat with it for a while, just looking at it. And i started crying.Ii didn't know why. It really did something to me. It is red with a blue stripe. A very bright red. And I had dressed to match it when taking it out of the kiln. I find it so fun to dress like my ceramics, to make clothes that imitate certain of their qualities, and vice versa make ceramic pieces that echo my sewing. And this bowl, I understood after this whole collection why it is so special. Once I was finally confident and bold enough to put the fucking lines across, the whole way, I saw the complexities on those lines joining, what it meant to have a confined space on a piece, and gravity pulled the blue line into the red, and at some spots it becomes purple and layered and I was perplexed. But that is a topic for another time.

Drawing, placing, pulling these lines across the whole piece, fully separating it, having clear distinctions is a visual manifestations of the lines I was drawing in my life. I completely stopped talking to some family members who had hurt me a lot in the past and I was finally bold enough to put myself first and say I will not stand by this. There is a clear line. And it will not be crossed. And in this collection, the lines are frozen as they are forever in time, ceramics will outlast us all, yet is it flat. The food you put on the plate is unaware of the line, of the limit. It moves around freely. The graphic nature of the line creates a stable foundation, a container for the future, a surface on which to flourish. 

The lines can be picture perfect, all aligned, one continuous line, but move just a bit and it is a completely different story. They never perfectly align, they slip, they become curves, what seemed so rigid is actually dynamic and fluid. It allows many iterations of the same concept.

They move with you, they are fun elements you can play with, consider how they align to themselves or how they appear in relation to the lines of the rims of the cups and plates. Sometimes diagonal, sometimes parallel to the rims, a whole universe of alignment opens, there is no one right answer even if there is just one line. We gain new perspectives on things, we can change our point of view on the same situation and see something completely different. If one moves, if one plays, nothing is ever as clear cut as it seems when one is still. And what a joy to be found in this richness of understanding.