Seven years

I made my first ceramic sculpture in India, seven years ago. I was at an artist residency in the middle of the jungle of Baroda, working with a group of artist friends. There were cobras who shed their skin in front of our houses before dawn, monkeys who stole our bras, and peacocks who sang their lonely songs from the dark foliage at night.

I remember the studio buildings as stunningly beautiful, giant palaces of red bricks, and I was working in the printmaking studio, which was on top of a hill overlooking the jungle and which you could reach by climbing up a long and steep stairway that seemed endless under the white sun of the tropics.
On the foot of that hill was the ceramics studio, where Deveshi Sahgal, an artist whom I met there and who has become a great friend since, was working on huge sculpture, alone.

I don’t remember much about what clay I used or which glaze or what tools. I have no idea what I did, and that's probably because I had no idea what I did.
I remember Iria Do Castelo, another artist who came down with us to the ceramics studio, creating a precious head at an incredible pace, and told me that later she would cut it off and empty it, both of which amazed me, her working pace and the cutting off.
I, working much much slower, was amazed how my artwork, which was all line and flatness, translated into the third dimension. I have never been able to draw hands, but I learned that I could sculpt them. Also, I was surprised by the realism the third dimension brought to my artwork.

For whatever reason, one of the sculptures I made was a pregnant woman, and someone bought it at our exhibition we later held in New Delhi. Someone with a pregnant friend, I think. The one you see my working on the photo is called “horny woman”, she took me ages to make, and I still have her.
During the following years, traveling around the world, I worked in many printmaking studios, but I did not get in touch which clay again. It just was nowhere to be seen. But it stayed in my head. Not at the forefront, but somewhere in a dark spot in the back of my head.

The seed was sown, and it took seven years to grow.

During these years, I was a person with wings, I flew around a lot, carrying nothing but a sketchbook, and occasionally, some aluminum plates. Light stuff. I ask myself why I only started ceramics last year, and I imagine that maybe, working with ceramics requires some kind of roots. It is heavy, earthy, inert, it needs a lot of space. It needs roots, something which took me a long time to grow.

And so it happened that I started to work in ceramics after I spent a lot of time in my home country in the Austrian Alps. While the pandemic has stirred up the world, it brought a lot of calm to my life. Things have slowed down. I don’t travel as much. If I’ve been a hunter, now I’m more like a fisher. The pond does not move, but it becomes wider and deeper. One year ago, I started to work with clay, this summer I started to work with porcelain.

Ceramics, surprisingly, has a lot in common with printmaking. The suspense, the element of chance, the sense of serendipity. It can be immensely frustrating and it is incredibly satisfying. It can be the best, and it can be the worst (it is a lot like life itself). Another thing printmaking and ceramics have in common is that in these fields, you never stop learning. It is like a cosmos, a cosmos that is vital, fertile, and infinite, you can never fully explore it, and this is the beauty of it. You can walk around it forever and still encounter things that make you wonder, and make your hands feel brand new. I have just begun to walk around in it, and it makes me think of a poem I once wrote on a later stay in India:

Half of the world

When I die
I want to be able to say:
I explored half of this beautiful world
and left the other half
to my beautiful imagination

Photo: A&Y

If you want to see more of this creative India episode, here you can find SAVARI, my sketchbook from that journey

The advantages of being a "woman artist"

Women artists. There is no such thing. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’. You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.

Dorothea Tanning

When I make a series of dinosaurs, nobody asks me why I make only dinosaurs. When I make an exhibition with travel-inspired work, nobody asks me why I didn’t make work inspired by my own country.*
When I make black and white work, nobody asks me about color and vice versa.
But beware, when I make an exhibition full of female figures**, I get asked: Why do you only make women?
This is a weird question. I am a woman. It is perfectly natural to be a woman. It is the human norm. Why shouldn’t I? What’s so special about it?

I’ve seen male artists paint only male figures (or only female figures). I know they don’t get asked the same question. Nobody will notice. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn't been thinking about this issue. Almost nobody asks why in newspapers, in movies, in children’s books – why literally EVERYWHERE there is a majority of men. Why do men get more, so much more space and time in media, in discussions, everywhere, when they make up less than 50% of us. No. We don’t even notice, because we have been gaslighted, and we continue to gaslight ourselves and others to see women as a minority, and we treat them as such. Although women are the majority.

A woman only drawing women, apparently, it’s too much to take. And especially the kind of women I make, not some sexy girls (where, again, it’s totally ok if it’s only women because these are not really essential women, but women seen through the male gaze, and god beware would we depict men as sex objects) but figures taking up a lot space and which have a lot of presence. These are not figures you can overlook. I understand, although they are not at all meant to be like this, that their energy can unsettle some people.

I can’t stand women being treated as something exotic, something out of the norm. Women are not exotic, we are the human norm. We are more than 50% of humanity and women make up 70% of our ancestors and women have a far greater influence on the genetic make-up of newborns than their respective fathers. Biologically, we are undisputedly the more significant sex, which is probably the reason we ended up in this neurotic patriarchal mess catering to the fragile male ego, men who cannot accept their natural place.

We are supposedly living in an “equal” society. But as a professional and as a creative, unlike the man, I am being defined by my sex first. Only next, I am an artist.

But no, I am not an artist, I am a “woman artist”. Did you ever ask yourself why there exists the term “woman artist”, but not the term “man artist” – and this in a world where the majority of artists are female? It’s ridiculous.

Oh my god, she’s a “woman artist”, how remarkable! Sensational! She does not create just art, she makes “female art”, “woman art” (whatever that is), she needs to be “empowered” and “celebrated” when all this “empowering” and “celebrating” women contributes to exoticize and infantilize us. Women are not weak creatures who need “help” to walk their path, we simply need society to stop putting stones in our way. But our way is full of stones.

We need the same chances and we don’t have them.

I often point it out to the persons responsible when women are discriminated und underrepresented in panels, discussions, and exhibitions everywhere, I point it out politely because even if I have all the right to be angry, the truth is women don’t have the right to be angry about this in our society. Anger would harm the cause, at least in this case. So I patiently explain to them what unconscious bias is. I tell them that we all have it. I ask them politely to think about women next time, to give them the same chances as men.

The answer I get is always disappointing. It’s always “just a coincidence”. There are, regularly, three or more times more men than women, but yeah, it’s always just a “coincidence”. Or I get no answer at all.

The saddest thing is, women get discriminated against by both women and men.

A few exhibitions that pretend to be “feminist” because a capitalist, pretty, and pretty toothless version of feminism has become some sort of a trend now, are not helping any female artist when this discrimination (“coincidence”) we face is denied and has absolutely no consequences when the rest of the time (and if you don’t believe this, because it’s so unbelievable, there are studies proving it) we have to work much harder than men for the same success and to survive, and when our work is bought less often and for lower prices and is regarded inferior to men’s work just because we are women.

______________________

* But the question I get asked most is “how is it as a woman in this country”, because of all the stories I have to tell, the stories of me being disrespected because of my sex apparently are the most interesting ones to people, bravo.

**In said exhibition there were also a few male figures. But as we know from scientific studies, where women take up only half of the space (just as it is their right) they are already perceived as the majority, as “too much"