Marek Cecula

www.marekcecula.com

PowerPoint Prepared by Brian Harper

MAREK CECULA ARTIST STATEMENT 

My artwork has no typical uniformity in its subject matter. I experiment with many physical and conceptual representations of ceramic objects and explore their meanings in contemporary culture.

I am seduced by the role ceramic plays in our lives and the esthetical values it carries. I am a watcher, an anthropologist, who is constantly discovering how we form relationships with these objects and their functions.

By rendering my ideas in three dimensions, I attempt to involve the viewer in the same process of focused imagination, leading through the landscape of ideational space that I passed through.

"FOR THE HEROES" The Stand.

For The Heroes is a singular structure constructed from very thin white porcelain slabs looking cracked,

deformed, and loosely assembled into Olympic winner stand.

This stand, physically is unstable and fragile, making this piece clearly unusable for originally designated

purpose, eliminating the possibility to place people, one above another.

“For the Heroes” The Stand

The Porcelain Carpet

Porcelain Carpet

The natural (obvious) tendency of walking on, or through the carpet, is directly undermined by the presence of fragile (breakable) material and the

association with the recognizable origin of porcelain dinner plates.

The galley viewer is faced with a self-awareness, which manifests itself in tension and caution. Limitation of

movement is imposed on the viewer by the sheer fragile nature of the material and the placement of the work.

The outcome of this restriction effects the physical and visual interaction with the work and offers a paradoxical

experience.

The Porcelain Carpet

The Porcelain Carpet

The Porcelain Carpet

Look Into My Mind

Look Into My Mind

The act of looking into the artist’s mind, is in this work a physical invitation designed for the viewer. The viewer must make a decision to either follow his curiosity and peep into

the designated opening, or to ignore it.

The main content of this work is hidden in its interior. In the cavity of the form there are images (visible in dim light

penetrating through translucent porcelain) representing the personal life of the artist within a private and mysterious

atmosphere.

They are biographical and the content might be banal for the stranger. Nevertheless, the stories of the artist’s private life are in public domain now, and serve as the only diversity

between these five forms, indicating the many multifaceted representations of the artist life.

Look Into My Mind

Interface

Interface

The activation of internal space (volume) becomes the central theme, which demands investigation on the

part of the viewer. The viewer here is enticed to participate in this experience through interaction with

the empty space of the ceramic forms. The interiors of the forms are prime, rich, luminous and seductive.

They draw a viewer into the cavities, stimulating the formation of meaning in the work and alert his

perception to the relationship of the inside and outside of the form.

"Interface" provides a contrasting vision between the external and internal character of being. The meaning of these contacts and their suggested tactility become

open material for further individual interpretation.

Interface

Interface

Interface

Interface

Interface

Violations

The strategy behind the process of creating this work title Violation was to reduce the typical labor-intensive

ceramic processes and to extract and emphasize strong conceptual content existing in the domestic

objects.

These new conditions transcended their visual representation beyond their originally designated

goals.

The "violation" as an idea and expression is manifested through those objects and the objects

becoming a documents representing their own history. Carrying forward the marks of makers and the marks of users as the evidence of their cultural, social and

political standards.

Violation

Violation

ShardThis ceramic piece provides a viewpoint that Nazism was not merely overt violence but a voracious totality, which required its conquest of

the domestic sphere and the innocent forms of daily life.

Violation

Hygiene

The idea of cleanliness and protection imposes specific conditions on related forms and objects, requirements

which render them simultaneously intimate and impersonal. The forms of the "Hygiene" series are

created primarily in vitreous china, a material which exudes archetypical associations with sanitary ware.

Each of the works in this series are multiples of identical forms in various accumulations, a strategy followed for

conceptual and esthetic ends. My intention is to disassociate the appearance of the work from any hand made processes and avoid the quasi-uniqueness of art

studio production.

Hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene

In Dust Real

In Dust Real

The project In Dust Real is a creative collision between Art, Craft and Design aiming to inject randomness into the

standard manufacture production.Selected forms from various porcelain manufactures were “burned again” in high temperature in traditional anagama wood fire kilns to achieve totally opposite condition from

conventional industrial standards. The strategy was to remove my self as a physical

manipulator of the objects and use only the critical ceramic process-THE FIRE as an element of creative and destructive

force. In this work, the imperfections and deformation are

intentional values, bringing the formal esthetic content under the scrutiny.

In Dust Real

In Dust Real

In Dust Real

In Dust Real

Beauty of Imperfection

I used different elements of nature to disturb, deconstruct and defunctionalize the classic industrial porcelain. Air, Fire, and Water were used separately in each group as a creative force making radical impact on the form, it’s designation and

the meanings.

In reaction to this fact I chose to reverse the conventional process of creating ceramic objects; ready-made industrial china was subjected to the individual destructive process,

which was designed to inject randomness into standardized production.

In this transformation, mass-produced porcelain objects became one of kind originals, challenging notions of beauty

and functionality and repositioning the values of mass product crossing over to the art territory.

Beauty of Imperfection

Beauty of Imperfection

Beauty of Imperfection

Beauty of Imperfection

www.marekcecula.com

Marek Cecula