Ikebab Scissors
For me, the Lockdown didn't just restrain my private life but also my work. Without any access to childcare, I had to stop making new work - any work.
I spend a lot of time outdoors in my garden, tending it looking after it.
I always had an interest in Ikebana - looking for interesting ways to display flowers. Attending classes and experimenting with flowers I bought from the high street.
But when I was mainly home, I started to use materials stems branches and blooms from my own garden.
So the item I found most enjoyable to use and live with was and is my Ikebab scissors plus all that grows in my environment.
Maybe I wasn't able to make pottery but I was able to use play with handle experience my pots by finding living things to put into them.
It gave me the opportunity to rethink shapes and what content does to a vessel, in more depth.
Katharina Klug
My work is about simplicity of design and shape, bringing these in relationship to the surface. I am inspired by the elemental colour and shape of ancient Korean pottery. What I love about ceramic is that it starts of as a soft lump and can become pretty much anything you want it to be. After the firing it is hard and durable and can survive centuries. But at the same time, it’s fragile and can be broken into pieces in a moment. I aim to create timeless vessels for contemporary interiors. Each piece is individually made from porcelain on the potter’s wheel. Naïve, spontaneous pencil strokes, graphic simple patterns that create movement and direction. Every line is drawn by hand which makes the work preserve the moment of making. The imperfections in the pattern make it lively, rough and immediate and unique but still holding an order or direction to bind them together. The Narrative to my work is coming from little snippets of observation in my environment. Lines are jumping out on me in almost anything – stripes on cloth, wires and cables, plants and grasses, architecture and streets just to name a few.
After growing up in my mother’s pottery business, I trained professionally at college in Austria and Germany for 6 years. I set up business in Cambridge in 2011 and have been given the silver award 2013 and 2015 by Craft and Design magazine in the ceramic category. In 2014 I was chosen to join the Crafts Councils Hot House program. In 2016 I was accepted for selected membership of the Craft Potters Association (CPA). In 2018 have been shortlisted for the international Nasser Sparkasse Ceramic Price Westerwald/Germany. 2017 I exhibited for the first time at Ceramic Art London and have shown at CAL three times since. I also got an honourable mention for two of my entries into the International Ceramic Festival competition Japan. My work was featured in the 289 issue of Ceramic Review for their Masterclass series in 2018.
