
All images © Claire Lindner, shared with permission
Vine-like colorful coils of material overlap in
Lindner plays on oppositions when designing her ceramics to “create a visual confusion that triggers our imagination.” She creates tensions between aesthetics and textures, including soft and hard, light and heavy, and attractive and repulsive.
Each piece is made from glazed stoneware, and before the artist starts working on a new sculpture, she envisions the “movements, flow, and colors” that make up its base and core. But as she works, she lets the material inform her choices. “Once in the making, I let myself be guided by the specificity of clay,” she explains. “I have to be attentive to its tensions, folds, and plasticity in order to make a form that will ‘flow’ and tell an interesting story.”
Lindner attended the Ecoles des Arts Décoratifs Strasbourg and developed an interest in clay from studying its organic and malleable characteristics. She compares her process to metamorphosis: how after time, one form changes into another. “Unlike glass, metal, wood, or 3D printing, working with clay felt like a prolongation of the body. It can be apprehended safely. It is soft and malleable,” she says. “It also has the ability in its process to keep all of the imprints of its manipulation, just like skin you can see the stretch marks, feel the tension, and play with the limits.”
In spring, Lindner will exhibit her work in a solo show at