Clay in Conversation 5: Difference is the fifth in a series of curated conversations, presenting artists working with clay and ceramics.
The curated conversations provide a platform for presentation, dialogue and discovery, bringing together a diverse range of artists with a practice using clay and ceramics.
Each conversation centres on a specific theme - acting as a lens through which the artists will present a piece of work or project. The conversations offer the opportunity to dig deeper into the work, exploring it formally, materially and conceptually, from the perspective of the artists themselves.
Clay in Conversation is curated by artist Julia Ellen Lancaster in partnership with the Ceramics Research Centre-UK (CREAM), University of Westminster https://cream.ac.uk/ and this episode is generously sponsored by Scarva Pottery Supplies https://www.scarva.com/
For this fifth conversation we present artists Sam Lucas and Laura Johanna König with Tessa Peters chairing.
Sam Lucas creates ambiguously figurative forms. In her own words she states ‘She does not make pretty things’, her work, instead, explores the idea of being in the body and social awkwardness. By exploring the idea of ‘being, rather than being seen’, she explores vulnerability and uncertainty, but with a dark humour. Her practice is driven by her own personal experience and observations of others throughout her life.
After completing an MA Ceramics at Cardiff in 2018, she was selected and exhibited in AWARD, the headlining exhibition at British Ceramics Biennial in 2019. Her ground breaking work went on to be exhibited with Taste Contemporary Gallery at Art Geneve 2020 and later that year she was selected for the Crafts Council Hothouse programme. In 2021 she began an AHRC funded practice-based PhD looking at ceramics and wellbeing at Sunderland University with Northern Bridge Consortium. Sam’s research explores the diversity in experience and how creativity, especially in clay can be used as a coping strategy to aid mental health. As part of her research she recently initiated the thought provoking, and diverse open exhibition ‘The Weight of Being’, held on line and in real life at Stroud Valley Artspace. The exhibition continues its life touring to other venues and in October she will take part in ‘Extreme Making’ at Glasgow School of Art as part of the European Academy of Design Conference.
Laura Johanna König is driven by her inexhaustible fascination for porcelain and has studied this material in various educational contexts and countries.
Laura completed her MFA Craft, Ceramics and Glass at Konstfack University, Stockholm in 2021, followed by a Research Exchange within the Ceramics Department at Saga University, Arita, Japan in 2022. She is currently undertaking a Visual Arts MPhil / PhD affiliated to the Ceramics Research Centre UK, at Westminster University, London
For Clay in Conversation, Laura will introduce her fascinating practice-based PhD project on ‘Skin Hunger’, which is the consequence of being deprived from interhuman touch. This psychological issue requires solutions of great sensitivity and is accompanied by philosophical concerns. Laura uses her artistic practice and the multifarious characters of porcelain to explore the complements and contradictions of touch variations, such as active and passive, physical and metaphorical, functional and emotional stimulations.
@joh.la.konig