January 27, 2013

winterSALON/2013: Joris Landman - Ka-boom!!! Flowers!!!


Photo by: JW Kaldenbach

This vase, in the shape of a volcano, is made of pitch-black clay erupting in brightly multi-coloured glaze lava flows. When in use, the flowers it contains resemble smoke billowing out of its crater.

Joris Landman:
“I was inspired by the idea that the Golden Age was a period in Dutch history of such great advancement in trade, science and art; the exhilarating energy of living in a time when the world is being discovered and conquered.
For example, Italianised paintings from that period: clumsy Italian landscapes and scenes made by painters who had never actually visited Italy but had access to imported pictures. They remind me of Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Rhinoceros’. Then there is the enthusiastic display of these advancements and their personal benefits, the claiming of bragging rights for being cultured—or just plain wealthy—by commissioning a lavish portrait or an intricate yet unpractical object, to savour in private or to serve as a prop-based conversation opener when callers came.
From these ideas came the image of a pitch-black volcano erupting in brightly multi-coloured lava flows; a sophisticated but naive and embellished representation of an awesome energy. When I started sketching, I saw that the volcano could be a vase with flowers billowing out of its crater. I had never worked with ceramics before and thought that such a design would be inherently ceramic, because it seemed that adding heat to clay until it turns to glass, is a process almost identical to volcanic eruption. To me, this work is an image of eagerness and culmination, of vacuity and overabundance, of power and ineptitude. I would request it to exclusively be used for dried bouquets of the rare flowers found on Miyake-jima.”



Joris Landman (1975) works as an editorial and graphic designer, with a focus on digital media. He completed his Master of Arts at the Rietveld Academie in 1995 and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Subjects include the emergence and storage of meaning through man-mad signs and signals.



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