how to feel full: ceramic vases & cages
kaisa lindfors
on view in gallery: july 27 - september 21, 2023
Kaisa Lindfors is a ceramicist who builds her work by hand primarily by pinching, that leaves intimate imprints of her hands and creates imperfect forms. Through the past year, she has been working on a new body of work that includes a series of vessels that are painted and written on using excerpts from her journal, both visual and written.
Through this exercise, she aims to use the juxtaposition of the fragile yet long lasting nature of the material to compare the making of a usually private practice both permanent and fragile, quiet and public. She is interested in revisiting places, landscapes and experiences to interpret these places through emotional response, to create a more “realistic” or true representation of my memory and experience. In her functional work, she strives to create pieces that are comfortable, playful, whimsical and hopeful.
“How to Feel Full” started as an exploration of using hand built ceramic vessels and sculptures to process excerpts and themes from my personal journals. While this work is inherently autobiographical, I aim for it to be a relatable search for meaning, purpose and what it means to belong to a place. I am interested in revisiting places, landscapes and experiences that I am connected to by translating them into drawing. I’m interested in the ways I can interpret these places through emotional response, to create a more “realistic” or true representation of my memory and experience. Imposing excerpts from my journal on to these works are a way to connect these experiences to these objects, which in themselves are intimate reflections of the marks from my hands. I hope to use the juxtaposition of the fragile yet long lasting nature of the material to compare to my making my usually private practice both permanent and fragile, quiet and public.
The vessels are all built by hand, primarily by pinching. This creates an intimate, paper-like texture from the imprints of my hands. Combined with the imperfect nature of the building process and the raw porcelain in the final firing, the vessels reflect the intimacy and slow nature of the subject matter. The imagery is done with underglaze that can act much like pencil and water colour.
The imagery is drawn from landscapes I know, from memory, from observation and from photographs. I’m more interested in the way it feels or is remembered than I am in exact representation and hope to reflect this through its representation. They explore themes of awe, quiet and a connection to landscape and the body. I spend many days of the year outside, working and playing in outdoor spaces that connect and ground me. These experiences offer a way of understanding scale on an intimate level and and offer a way to view myself and my body. Through writing I question what our responsibility to these landscapes looks like both personally and collectively in a time of an ever-changing climate. Is it important to accurately represent the landscape as it is now alongside the awe? What kind of responsibility do we have to empower others to connect with this kind of awe?
These hand-built vessels are also accompanied by small sculptures and armatures that I call cages. These cages accompany the vessels to explore another form of drawing in space and to provide an alternative to standard plinths to support the work, to act as stand-alone sculpture or to envelop the vessels.”
Kaisa Lindfors is a ceramic artist from Gatineau, Quebec living and working in Revelstoke, British Columbia. She makes handbuilt, handpainted ceramic work that is informed by her drawing and writing practice. She primarily uses the technique of pinching which creates an intimate, texture surface to paint on. She aims to create pieces that are hopeful, whimsical and thoughtful through the use of colour and by using recognizable imagery and words. She creates pieces that serves as quiet reflections of her lived experiences and use them to share these thoughts and feelings to connect with others. Her work is informed by her years working in the bush as a tree planter and by her continued love for spending time exploring outdoors.
She has a BFA from Concordia University, where she first encountered ceramics but mostly pursued her degree in painting and drawing. She has been making functional and sculptural ceramics in various shared and community spaces across the country and now works out of her studio in Revelstoke BC. She has participated in several group shows as well as three solo shows to date.