Atelier NL

Modern Painters May 2010 - seen here

I used to subscribe to Modern Painters magazine, but I gave it up a while back - it seemed to get less and less relevant to me. This month's cover really tweaked my interest however both the objects shown in the image and the painterly treatment of the shot.

The pots shown here are part of a collection called Drawn from Clay, made by Nadine Sterk and Lonny Van Ryswyck of Atelier NL in the Netherlands, the winners of the inaugural 2010 re:vision Design Award, set up by Modern Painters. The award seeks to address "...the disjunction between our material culture and the resources exploited to support it..." The magazine sees 'design' as the perfect intermediary discipline through which to consider these issues without adopting a "...Luddite attitude toward consumption."

The makers met in 1999 at the Design Academy Eindhoven and after graduation launched Atelier NL in 2006 to pursue their interests in local resources for clay. To make the Drawn from Clay series they studied geological soil maps and set about visiting and seeking the permission of landowners to collect buckets of particular soil types from Dutch regions to make clay. They have discovered 14 clay types from different regions (Polders) of the Netherlands. Nadine Sterk says of the project "What I really like about this material is that so many details, so much history, jump out from a little piece of soil...the surviving brick factories still use natural clay, but they mix it with all different minerals to get the perfect colour"...because of this homogenisation, plus the prevalence of white-glazed porcelain, we tend to forget that ceramics are made of earth or that towns and nations have forged identities through architecture, tools and tableware whose peculiar characteristics owe much to the dirt beneath the inhabitants' feet.' P.65 May edition of Modern Painters

There is a beautiful balance between the rustic simplicity of the form and materials and the contemporary additions of pewter and glass; both elegant and earthy.

Atelier NL - Drawn from Clay - seen here