PROCESS

Monika Patuszynska actively seeks out difficulties posed by working in porcelain, difficulties that often cause ceramists to stick to tried and tested ways of making. She wants the problems, she literally sets herself tasks that are so challenging she needs a plan B and C to fall back on. Her experience of porcelain factories led her to the conclusion that perhaps those seams and edges from the casting process, those that we strive to remove yet so persistently re-appear, are in fact an essential part of the clay, its tendency, its want. So, like the antithesis of a porcelain factory worker she sets about smashing the moulds, sawing them into shards, then piecing them back together to create new formations, to make new molds. She actively seeks the seams, edges and broken textures to create dynamic and fluid forms. The process is like fitting together an awkward, jutting jigsaw. That it works, that the porcelain cast survives with contrast in thickness and texture is perhaps in part due to serendipity but more essentially, to an exceptional knowledge of the material. 

Dr Natasha Mayo, a senior lecturer at the National Centre for Ceramics, Wales, practitioner, writer and researcher into ceramics and creative pedagogies.

Her process incorporates a fuller comprehension of the trials and procedures involved in creating porcelain. In effort to explore and elicit an understanding of the material and tactile language of porcelain, abandoned molds from distinctly discarded projects are collected and reconfigured to pose not only new forms, but a new existence of materiality for porcelain. New birth is given to ‘bastards’ and ‘orphans’ offspring of unknown parental origin, set free into the world, fully accepting the destined outcome of the creative experiment. Characteristics otherwise considered tarnished become provocative pronouncements of existence; cracks, fissures, and topples become fully and wholly themselves; servitude and uprightness becoming utterly meaningless. The decay of industrial decline and human aspiration, the material memory itself is transformed into a capsule like ice and rock through a glacier, serving nothing but its own existence.

Ryan Matthew Mitchell, an independent artist, International Curator and Coordinator for Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, China.

Material that, for some, epitomizes banality and crass commercial kitsch is elevated to high art in her studio. (…) Casting is Patuszynska’s primary artistic technique. Traditionally an industrial method to produce identical commercial products, in her hands it becomes a means of producing enormously rich and almost impossibly unique pieces. The limits of proper casting technique has always seemed too narrow for her. The list of do nots becomes for her a list of must do, something to be explored. As Bernoulli said of Newton “Tanquam ex ungue leonem” (We know the lion by his claw). The same can be said of Monika Patuszynska.

Noel Montrucchio, a freelance writer and former editor of one of Europe’s most popular architecture and design magazines; an avid collector of ceramic and glass sculpture.

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