Porcelain – Sensitivity – Wiener Zeitung Online

Sandra Haischberger / fine things

It was so boring at PädAk, where Sandra Haischberger studied English and gymnastics. That’s why she switched to product design at the University of Applied Sciences. “Until then, porcelain was an industrial material for me. I wasn’t aware that you could also produce it with a small infrastructure.” The first sales experience 17 years ago was frustrating: “After every Christmas market I cried because I still hadn’t sold anything.”

It irritated people that you could also do other things with the technology they were familiar with from Augarten, for example. The 52-year-old is now the figurehead of modern Viennese porcelain, so to speak. Her pieces are also sold through dealers abroad, but the best place to shop is in her shop on Margaretenstraße with an adjoining workshop. Her bestseller is her “Alice” crockery set in muted bright colours. In college, something like that was discouraged: “Nobody buys it.” That has changed, and not just since the pandemic focus on your own four walls.

Incidentally, a 12-piece service made entirely by hand takes four to eight weeks to complete. For example, you can only cast one plate per mold per day. That gives the crockery its own value, she says: “Nowadays there is hardly anything that you have to wait for.” As with any handicraft, especially when it is so delicate, the pieces are never perfect. A puff of air is enough for a mug to have a little “depscher”. You always have to convince customers: “I then ask, should I throw it in the garbage every time? Everyone wants to be sustainable, but please with a perfect mug.”

Sustainability was important to Haischberger right from the start, so she does not use burning aids that end up in the bin after use. With her other series “Raw” she follows the path even more consistently: After some tinkering she succeeded in producing new porcelain mass from sections of “Alice” that were thrown away in the past. Because different colors are mixed together, each result is a surprise.

Although she is always shedding objects from the range, she has an all-time favorite that has been around for over ten years: the “Moonstruck” lamp. A porcelain ball with a free-drawn flower pattern made of holes, which then cast a decorative shadow. Inspired by a renowned porcelain company that she now competes with: Herend.

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Birgit Weinstabl / Penelop

When Birgit Weinstabl first came into contact with porcelain in Hermann Seiser’s workshop, it was love at first sight. She also likes the meditative aspect of her work: she needs a plaster mold for each piece, then the porcelain object has to be fired, first at 900 and then at 1,200 degrees. “It’s only after three days that I see what I have. And I’m actually someone who gets things done quickly,” says the 38-year-old with a laugh.

Weinstabl’s signature product are porcelain rings, and these comparatively small objects alone take a week to complete. But how does one come up with the idea of ​​designing a ring out of fragile porcelain of all things? “I like that this ring is something that you have to pay attention to, that needs sensitivity. You can then translate that into self-appreciation.”

Weinstabl also produces other objects in her studio in Vienna’s third district, for example wall vases in the form of branches. She got the inspiration for this in Berlin: “I lived in Pankow for a while and nature is everywhere on the streets.” Another inspiration, less welcome, came in spring 2020. In response to the pandemic, she “spontaneously cast wall plates with the heartfelt imprint ‘Fuck’. I then put them on Instagram and before long they were all gone.” Interest in the curses has now waned again, she says: “Now more ring bowls for weddings are in demand again.”

Weinstabl was born in the Waldviertel and realizes art projects in public space in Lower Austria once a year – always with white porcelain because it “breaks with nature”. So she put 100 swallows on former farms along the Austrian-Czech border, in places that were not resocialized after the Sudeten Germans had fled, and she researched who lived there before. And as part of the quarter festival, she let porcelain fish fly over the Thaya.

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Anna Holly / Hollyaroh

The milk jug was glazed green and black, which awakened Anna Holly’s soft spot for handmade ceramics from her childhood days. At the University of Applied Arts, she turned to the material seriously, but soon discovered that porcelain appealed to her even more: that something is both hard and fragile at the same time fascinates her right from the start, the process from the liquid basic material to the very fragile intermediate stage from shaping to firing, which then makes the porcelain amazingly solid.

Of course, the 41-year-old Viennese also has a relaxed approach to shards: “It’s part of life when something breaks. Anyway, I think the best service is one in which you mix different pieces. I like to break with tradition, that a service is no longer worth anything if a piece is missing. Today, delicate porcelain is easier to deal with.” Postscript: “I find surprisingly little down.”

The first piece that Anna Holly made at university was mocha cups. In the case of the small, colorful mugs, she was also able to duplicate them to sell them. She started with a choice of five animals to decorate with. Today, the pastel mugs are the most popular pieces from her workshop, and there are now 30 animal motifs that can be made into 250 variations. Not only animals, but also bicycles or even an empress populate the cups and reflect the humor of their creator. All are of course handmade in her workshop in Vienna Josefstadt. “You can already tell that people appreciate handicrafts more again, that they like to buy regionally.”

And other trends can also be found in Holly’s range: The new “Aphrodite” soap dish, for example, was created during the first Corona lockdown – when soap suddenly became particularly prominent again. As a porcelain designer, she is always tinkering, currently she is working on how to inject porcelain mass into shapes “like a choux pastry donut”. What is also very difficult to make, by the way, are spouts. Which in turn gives a whole new value to the milk jug of childhood. Doesn’t help, it still doesn’t exist anymore.

www.hollyaroh.com

Andrea Kollar

Mathilde was the first. And it was an instant hit. Andrea Kollar’s vases in the shape of a woman’s body can even be found in the living rooms of Hollywood stars. It all started with a textile print, for which Kollar had to draw a woman. Then a button popped up: “Oh my God, that’s exactly my topic!” Was her thought. She put her drawings on Instagram, where they immediately sold in the United States.

Now she also wanted to design her “ladies” in three dimensions. “I knew nothing about clay and ceramics,” she says. Some ceramists declined, saying it would take years to accomplish something like this. Then she came across Hermann Seiser, in his studio there is no such thing as a hasty “there isn’t”. For a year Kollar learned modeling, mold making and porcelain casting step by step. And then Mathilde was done. Within days, the body vases found homes in Paris, Los Angeles and Japan.

Finally, the porcelain nudes of the US influencer Aimee Song caught the eye and so they found their way into the living rooms of Kylie Jenner, Jessica Alba and also in a music video by Lizzo. That in turn fits wonderfully, since the singer is a representative of the body positivity movement. “No body is perfect”, this is also reflected in Kollar’s vases, because they also show that it is precisely the small flaws and bumps that come with manual work that make them special.

The 42-year-old realizes that ceramics is currently experiencing a huge boom. “Ten years ago if I had told my friends I was doing a ceramics class, they would have given me weird looks. It was something that single ladies in their 60s did. But the change came super fast. There’s something healing about the work and the appreciation is big, the trend is moving away from Ikea towards individual pieces.”

Speaking of Ikea and Co: Kollar is relaxed about the fact that machine-made women’s body vases can now be bought almost everywhere – and socially: “I was in the fashion industry for ten years. You’re used to that. Young women often write to me that they like the vases like that I think it’s great but can’t afford it. That way it’s accessible to them too. And for me it’s an incentive to develop the work further.”

andreakollar.at

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