GLAZED & CONFUSED

Chin Tsao, Nico Ihlein, Nschotschi Haslinger, Mylasher, Ana-Marija Vasicek, Leon Höllhumer, Sofie Fatouretchi, Philipp Zöhrer

12.12.2019—08.01.2020

Eisenbahnstr. 141a, Leipzig

We are going to mold a piece of clay today. Then 5,50€ glaze it! But remember to keep your experiments safe. And always let the clay slide between your fingers – and be careful, we don’t want any entrapped air in there. Dreaming of lines, that aren’t straight, edges that wriggle along, Patrick Swayze hugging me from behind, guiding my hands, throwing a sort of vase in a shape that has never been seen before. Erecting it.
Burn the vase, paint it and send it straight back to hell so it can come back purified and have me and you and everyone else inside. “How dare you building up like that and then not deliver? You have stolen my dreams that I tried to catch, but still, I don’t know if I even want them back. I am living, L-I-V-I-N-G!“

We all suspected “Glazed and Confused” was going to incarnate a zeitgeist we wanted to inhabit yet never could (and never will)...........................................................................

Maybe as an antipole to the fast-paced digitalized world we live in, we discover this “Return To Craft” that demands patience and practice. An accelerationist, playful approach striving against the perfection of ceramic craft as we know it from the industrial production and distribution of ceramic goods can be observed: Imperfection, Dysfunctionality or an intuitive interaction with the inherent material character of clay could be read as a statement against mass production, as it inherently retains traces of its sculptor. The portrayed motives share a fantastic and uncanny vibe making it a tool for manifesting personal fictions without pushing a certain narrative or instruction on how they have to be read.
Originating from the need to make the porous vessel suitable for holding liquids, glazing the pottery with a layer of glass becomes an important aesthetic factor, adding the shiny aura, that implements value, making it seem both solid and fragile at the same time. This finishing stresses the three-dimensionality of the object, portraying it as highly photogenic and weirdly linking it back to a computer-rendered digital image.