Label
The heavily textured undulating surfaces billow, gather, and fold like linen. Porcelain, my main medium, recalls the crisp starched fabrics of a long-gone past. They stubbornly hold their shape, while beginning to softly succumb to unseen forces. For me, the craft heritage of handmaking is as important as the digital technology I utilize for building the sculptures.
Domestic textiles from my native Hungary are my inspirations: puffy down beddings “dunyha” and linen wedding dowries “kelengye” decorated with traditional cross-stitch embroidery patterns from Central and Eastern Europe. A maternal lineage of back-breaking labor performed in textile mills and lace factories, mending, and sewing for hire connects this material domain to the social as I consider personal and community histories, economic and political contexts through the language of these two materials: cloth and clay. Being part of the early innovators with ceramic 3d printing, I examine, utilize, and critique the binary world of technology
when I place the digital in dialogue with the material. Layering simple geometric motifs found in Hungarian embroidery, I build my surfaces meticulously and patiently in a Computer Aided Design (CAD) program until a more complex and entirely novel pattern emerges. The stiches in the cloth are translated as textures—made up by small bumps and loops in porcelain—extruded by the 3D printer. While made digitally, my work embraces the pottery tradition of the vessel.
Surrounding a hollow volume, the walls in ceramics are being shaped by pressure both from the inside and the outside. Similarly, my sculptures are reshaped after the printing with gentle and patient forces during repeated firings. The precision of the digital code meets accidental slippages of the clay, balancing of intention with serendipity, precariousness with strength, and mathematical logic with beauty.