Porcelain Brut/An Artist-in-Residence Project by Kurt Spurey

摘要

For more than a century, artists have used the processes inherent in industrial production for their own artistic purposes. This is exactly the point of a project undertaken by Austrian artist Kurt Spurey at Augarten Porcelain in Vienna. During his residency at the factory, he chose three aspects of the industrial process as points of departure for the development of his pieces: the pugs as they came out of the mill; the scraps of porcelain resulting from the production of hollow- and flatware; and the combination of elements from production with freely formed elements. His objective was to uncover the hidden characteristics and special qualities of the material (porcelain), and to use these as central issues in the production of vessels. The extruded pug, no matter what shape it had taken as it came out of the machine, was used directly as the point of departure. The fingerprints of the worker running the pug mill, as well as the structure resulting from the extrusion pressure itself, remain. In order to emphasize and make visible the inner structure of the pug, the outer layers were sometimes torn away. The exposed structure created by this technique revealed not only the production process, but also the characteristics of porcelain, including its transparency and fragility.