During my last year at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy I became interested in realism in semiotics. Realism is semiotically seen as a pragmatical relationship between a sign and the reverent of the text. The realistic effect is the fading difference between a sign (which is connected to a meaning) and the reverent (which is made up by a text). The distance between a reality and its reverent made up out of signs is at the same time invisible or not there.
I’m interested in how shapes evolve from basic principles. These principles are bound up with the types of material and the way they are worked. The hand, the machine and the mold are three basic tools for generating shape.
How can a shape cut-out of a wooden plate become an integral part of the material it was cut-out of? By creating a negative space inside the material, the opportunity for the material to represent or become a scale model for an absent shape opens up.
In ceramics the coil building technique is one of the oldest ways to shape clay, working in an upward movement, from the bottom to the top. When I think of ceramics I mostly think of pots, table ware and vases. The material and its signification, the material as embodiment of a symbolic archetype is something I tried to work and play with.