Alicja Patanowska

Potter and designer, who graduated in Ceramics and Glass from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014 and in Ceramic Design from Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland in 2011.

Craft skills are crucial for her artistic and design practice since she creates through manual experiments with materials. Alicja Patanowska combines glass with porcelain, and visual arts with designing, always aiming to engage the audience. Waste is a recurrent motive in her artistic work, which is inevitably connected with a critical reflection on human needs and the escalation of consumption chaos. Her answer to the ever increasing chaos of consumption is personal involvement in the creation of a product.

Alicja Patanowska, Future Heritage 2016 Alumna

A laureate of a number of awards, including the Franz Award (2019), Mazda Design Award (2018), British Glass Biennale (2015). Her artworks are included in many art and design collections, such as the Shanghai Museum of Glass. Her products are available worldwide, including Merci (Paris), Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle (Berlin), Barbican Centre and TATE Modern (London). Her art has been presented at over 100 exhibitions around the world: UK, Denmark, Ireland, Korea, Germany, Azerbaijan, Sweden, Finland, China, Brasil.

Infinity By Alicja Patanowska

At Future Heritage

The AeRiForm and Stratum Collections are projects where I combine different media in a dialogue between two craft skills – glass-blowing and wheel-throwing. By investigating the capacities and limitations of the materials (opacity, colour, structure etc.), I analyse the notion of space: its harvesting, limiting, containing, releasing... These correlations decide how we understand space.

“Future Heritage project created by the curator Corine Julius has a very significant title. Reflection on it strongly influenced my subsequent projects. My artistic attitude is also a voice in the discussion about the state of the modern world. What we will once call the Heritage we create today. At the center of my interests is traditional craft and its very new contexts.” - Alicja Patanowska

Current work

Errorica

Errorica is a story of the beauty of technical errors which occur during the production of ceramics. Thanks to understanding and harnessing such phenomena as the cracking or shrinking of glaze it is possible to obtain unusual decorative textures while maintaining the product’s utility features. On every object the cracking patterns are different, yet their similarity creates a coherent line of products, which are unique and functional at the same time. The quest to find common areas of art and design by experimentally studying the limitations of techniques and technology is a natural consequence of the designer’s lifelong search of unconventional applications of knowledge and craft skills.

PFP (Porcelain, Filament, Plastic)

The art installation has been developed specifically for the market place called Nowy Targ in Wroclaw, Poland. It addresses the questions of modern consumption by referring to the historic intended use of the square’s.

The wheel-thrown base made of luxurious noble porcelain with rare celadon glaze (pale greyish shade of green) refers to the centuries-old Chinese tradition. The base is topped with a finely woven, unnaturally coloured part whose origin is far from obvious. This part is made of waste plastic, processed into filament, which was then used to print the object.

Aeri Form By Alicja Patanowska

If you would like to make an enquiry about Alicja Patanowska and commissions, get in touch here or visit her website https://patanowska.com/