Karin Schweikhard (Ingelheim 1953).
She creates stoneware ceramics that she decorates with classic glazes such as Shino-, wood ashes- and copper glazes, celadon or tenmoku. She fires her work in a reducing atmosphere in a gas kiln, since 2013 also in a wood firing kiln that was built by Australian kiln builders/potters Steve Harrison and Janine King and with the help of a number of colleague potters.
The works of Karin consists of bowls and (square) dishes, trays, pots, containers and vases. It is realized as well on the potters wheel as freely built from slabs. Striking in the decoration of the plates and dishes is the original geometrical composition of colour fields and images that are mostly asymmetrical in nature. Often this composition is completed with scratched in line game that eventually will take form as a highly personal and intriguing scripture which makes us think of the writing of an undiscovered culture or cryptography. A dancing line play is taking shapes as a network, it is as if it winds itself around the pot as a garment.
The vessels and containers are mostly soberly decorated with sensitive scratching through the glaze that covers the surface. There where more glaze layers are super positioned we can see the under glaze lighten up or the other way we see dark lines in a bright surface.
By using super positioned glazes, the appliance of wax resist decoration and scratches in the glaze this work obtains also a very strong tactile quality, you will like to take it in your hands, turn it round and round, you will like to feel it.
The wood fired ceramics are in general more sober in appearance, here the wood kiln itself does labour through the on-flight of the ashes, the long firing time and the nature of work that is fired: tea bowls, containers and vases with application of feldspar- shino sometimes and celadon glazes.
Karin lives with her partner Michael Limbeck in Homberg-Ohm in a historical half timbered farmhouse where in her studio too is situated; in the original horse stable with an authentic floor of glacier boulders is situated a showroom for her work.
N.B Look for individual works on the Dutch page of this artist.