Ceramics and Glass

Everything starts with the material. Often the idea is not fully formulated before the hands begin their work. A force, a touch or a press starts up the material, puts it in motion and allows it to be reshaped. Staying in motion up until the point the hand decides it should stop.

Collecting, shaping and letting the materials speak with their own voice, remember in their own way. It is a work that extends through time, that reaches back, into history, into the hands of those who came before. Because it is always so: we are born into something that is already in progress; we step into a story which is not our own, but which we nevertheless must relate to.

And make our own. Which will carry on into the future and create the narrative into which others will step.

Understanding the story that we are a part of and taking it into the future is what three years of education in Ceramics and Glass are all about.

And the heritage, that which always seems so incontrovertible, so unyielding, what do we do with that? In our hands it becomes concrete, a resistance, a confirmation, a question. What was about to slip away is captured, reformed, given a new place in the light. And perhaps it is precisely here where something lasting can be found: in what we no longer take for granted, in what we recreate, in what we hold onto. In the material.

Nina Westman
Guest senior lecturer, Ceramics and Glass