Coral – deep dives into climate change
Courtney Mattison
North America
The ceramicist
‘I create enormous and intricate ceramic sculptural works inspired by the beauty and fragility of marine life in response to human-caused threats,’ says San Francisco-based artist and ocean advocate Courtney Mattison. A graduate of both ceramic sculpture and marine ecology from Skidmore University, and with environmental and design studies completed at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, Mattison has exhibited across the US, is featured in several public collections worldwide, and in 2020 had her work reproduced on a stamp commemorating Earth Day. Born in 1985, it was as a teenager at high school that Mattison simultaneously discovered marine biology and ceramics, turning to the latter to sculpt the marine organisms she was studying to better understand them.
The works
‘It is essential that my works be ceramic, as calcium carbonate happens to be both a glaze ingredient and the compound precipitated by corals to sculpt their stony structures,’ explains Mattison. She adds another reason for opting to work with stoneware: like coral, porcelain is fragile, reinforcing a
look-don’t-touch approach to observers of both. Mattison sculpts to raise awareness around the fragility of our oceans, and hopes her large-scale installations (oversized so as to have maximum impact) will foster in viewers not only personal con-nections with the marine world, but a desire to protect it. Using
a coiling technique that results in hollow forms, Mattison not only replicates existing coral structures but also invents hybrids. She does so with the hope that this fantastical combination will inspire a sense of wonder in her viewers since, in the bigger picture, relatively few people on the planet get to witness the somewhat alien-looking life forms beneath the ocean’s surface. With titles like ‘Gyre’ and ‘Our Changing Seas’, her installations are characterised by spiralling movement, often with a combination of coloured and white components that speak to the threat of coral bleaching.
courtneymattison.com and erichennebert.com
Earth – humankind’s progress under the lens
Tom Hegen
Germany
The photographer
‘Some pilots feel they need to show off their flying skills,’ says aerial photographer Tom Hegen, chuckling about a frustration of life on the job. Such winged antics clearly don’t deter him from taking to the skies again and again, and the world’s a better place for it. For in the tradition of French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Hegen photographs Earth from above, and in so doing insists we confront our impact on the planet. Initially a classic landscape photographer, Hegen quickly realised that the ‘sugar-coated’ images he was capturing weren’t entirely accurate depictions of his world. ‘I wanted my landscape photography to document places influenced by humans, and not unspoiled nature.’ With almost a decade’s worth of awards under his belt, including second place in the 2023 International Photography Awards, Hegen not only exhibits globally, but has published three photographic books.
The imagery
The formal underpinnings – like colour, pattern, and the rule of thirds – of Hegen’s background in graphic design strongly shape his imagery, resulting in interpretations of the Earth’s surface that are graphic and largely abstracted. His intent is to encourage society to consider and interrogate the complex relationship we share with nature, increasingly to its detriment. Overcoming logistical hurdles and following extensive research, he travels the planet, photographing from the interiors of small planes, helicopters and hot-air balloons, occasionally even using quadrocopters. His subjects? Coal, gold and copper mines, quarries, greenhouses, ash ponds and salt pans – like his recent ‘Lithium’ series shot in Chile. ‘We need to understand the value of all resources, and how supposedly positive progress may impact elsewhere,’ he says. ‘As we slowly move towards a world of sustainable energy, replacing fossil fuels with clean energy causes a new spiral of human impact on the environment.’ By capturing beauty within terrains heavily transformed by human intervention, Hegen hopes to sensitise viewers to the repercussions of pervasive mining, farming and polluting.
Fruit and vegetables – artificially engineered perfection
Robert Stadler
France
The designer
Born in 1966 in Vienna, Robert Stadler was a co-founder in 1992 of the Radi Designers group, an industrial design collective that won the Designer of the Year Award at the Salon de Meuble in Paris in 2000. A year later, the multidisciplinary designer established his own studio in Paris, and it’s from here that he has worked on commissions for clients including Hermès and Vitra. Stadler’s design projects include restaurant interiors like that of K+ Café at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, olfactory installations, windows for Dior, and product and furniture pieces too numerous to mention. While not a designer who draws solely from nature, Stadler repeatedly and critically addresses current issues in his work, like his 2023 furniture collection cleverly titled ‘OMG-GMO’, which has garnered considerable recognition for its tongue-in-cheek look at the genetic manipulation of fruit and vegetables.
The OMG-GMO collection
‘My pieces highlight the artificiality of the tame fruit and vegetables we cultivate and consume,’ Stadler says, ‘drawing attention to the fact that their current form is the result of a very long process of agricultural domestication, selective breeding, and bioengineering.’ Ten amusing furniture and household pieces – everything in scale from lemon paperweights to a carrot floor lamp, and a watermelon stool to a zucchini bookshelf – include pristine fruit or vegetables all uniform in shape, and handcrafted in ceramic by Italian specialists Bitossi Ceramiche. ‘I used produce, the natural shapes of which suggest a possible use, like the bolt-shaped top of a zucchini for assembling shelves.’ Nodding, somewhat humorously, to a history of fruit and vegetables in art that embraces Renaissance artist Arcimboldo and Pop icon Andy Warhol’s ‘Space Fruit’, Stadler’s collection considers a world in which we strive for artificial perfection, as much in the form of square watermelons, white strawberries and straight cucumbers, as in the appearance of our faces and bodies.
Forests – arboreal expressions of identity and displacement
Aneta Regel
England
The ceramicist
Born in Poland in 1976, Aneta Regel spent her formative years in Gdynia, before moving to England aged 25. She was raised in an austere apartment building, its architectural style not generally associated with creativity. But for Regel, it was the views from her home and the surrounding landscape to which she returns in her work. ‘Our flat was on the seventh floor of a tower block situated in the middle of a forest. It was a surreal setting dominated by the strong contrast of the concrete and the natural, the green and the grey,’ she recalls. ‘The forest was a massive playground for me. Trees were climbed to the point of naming certain branches and calling them home. There was a strong sense of warmth, vegetal energy and intimacy.’
The works
With degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, the University of Westminster and the Royal College of Art, Regel sculpts memories of this sylvan childhood. ‘I look to reflect that familiarity and intimacy in the pieces I make. I wanted to put that life into form, arrest motion, capture energy and rhythm. To not simply make a shape, but a feeling, a smell, an energy, an emotion.’ This connection to nature is equally about displacement and Regel’s identity, for she belongs to the last generation able to recall Poland’s Communist era and its end. Her ceramics, crafted from porcelain, stoneware clay and foraged volcanic rock, reflect techniques mastered. As Freya McLeavy, from Regel’s agent, Sarah Myerscough Gallery, describes, ‘They are repeatedly dried and re-fired, telling a story of constant metamorphosis, of conflict and change, pushing the materials to their limits in the kiln, testing their malleability and density, strengths and weaknesses.’ The results are visceral and organic, arboreal or animalistic forms with surface textures that evoke subterranean transmutations and a strong connection to past landscapes.
Insects – biodiversity loss and the horrors of habitation
Chris van Niekerk
South Africa
The artist
It’s tempting to consider horticulturist turned botanical artist Chris van Niekerk a modern-day Frankenstein. From his studio in the Western Cape town of McGregor, Van Niekerk painstakingly creates insects. ‘I am attracted to the challenge and limitations of a process that requires extreme concentration, creativity and patience,’ he says of his bugs, sent out into the world to collectors and galleries. Like Frankenstein’s monster, his creatures are not taxonomically accurate, and the materials he turns to, entirely unexpected. However, unlike Frankenstein, Van Niekerk’s horror comes not in the act of creation. Instead, it’s a horror that’s endemic to mankind, and it’s to raise awareness of this that his insects exist. Having studied entomology, Van Niekerk is acutely aware of the extent to which, in recent decades, nearly a third of all land insects have been destroyed as a result of pollution, chemical pesticides and the destruction of their natural habitats. ‘I want to use my art as a means of creating awareness that the extinction of insect species threatens the continued existence of all life on earth,’ he explains.
The artworks
Quick glimpses of Van Niekerk’s framed insects can be deceiving, for there is beautiful illusion at play. To bring one’s eye up close to each is to discover the ingenuity behind its creation. ‘I meticulously shape leaves, seeds, thorns, roots, bark, grass and foraged botanical material into realistic looking miniature sculptures,’ he says of the preserved fynbos matter that is his material palette, adding that not only is the preservative biodegradable but that it accentuates fynbos colours. ‘I use my knowledge of entomology as inspiration, but don’t aim to replicate specific species.’ While his crawling and flying insects are imaginary, his use of fynbos (found only in the Western Cape) means that each creature, wherever it may find a home in the world, remains, in part, local.
facebook.com/chrisvanniekerkbotanicals
Seedpods – resilience in the face of personal adversity
Sarah Heinamann
South Africa
The artist
‘After the dissolution of my marriage, I found myself buried underground, needing to choose a new way of being in the world,’ explains Cape Town’s Sarah Heinamann, of the shift in her artmaking from painting to sculpting that followed her divorce seven years ago. It was then that the artist, a 1990s graduate of London’s Central Saint Martins, turned her attention to seedpods, a symbol of the archetypal feminine. ‘Like a womb, they contain seeds, and are a space of birth and regeneration, but they’re also the part that breaks. Seedpods decay, becoming the compost that creates the fertile space for a new seed to take root.’ Recognising similarities between their lifecycle and her own, Heinamann set about collecting seedpods. Scanned three-dimensionally and printed at enlarged scales, she began a process, in one of Cape Town’s pre-eminent bronze foundries, not only of learning to forge, but of self-discovery. ‘My growth as an artist and empowered woman can be tracked, from the well-dressed woman who entered the chaos and mess of foundries and factories, asking men for help in making my pieces, to the artist I am today – one who has learnt the technical skills and gets physically involved.’
The artworks
It wasn’t long before Heinamann’s bronze seedpods evolved into her current sculptures, totems ranging in height from the tabletop to those almost two metres tall. If her small bronzes were a rite of passage, the point of arrival are her totems, explorations of her fascination with sacred geometries and the shamanic. ‘Each one is like building an altar,’ she says of her totems, which comprise not only a crowning bronze seedpod, but combinations of quartz, gemstones, patinated brass and ceramic forms. ‘Totems connect the earth and the sky, humans to God. In mine, the seedpods are elevated for one to circle and acknowledge. Ultimately that’s about reclaiming and allowing all parts of me to be seen.’
By Martin Jacobs
