Bodies of Clay

ART

11 Sept

Berta-Blanca T. Ivanow

You want to close your eyes. That is the first thing. Not to look away, but because the hands seem to know something the eyes cannot reach. Berta-Blanca T. Ivanow's sculptures ask to be touched in the dark, felt slowly, the way you learn the shape of something you already love.

Her pieces ask nothing of you loudly. They wait. It is only when you move closer, close enough to see where the glaze pooled, where a crack opened in the firing, where the surface thins until light passes through it, that you feel it: the desire to touch, and the instinct to be gentle.

She was born in 1992 on the Catalan coast and left it early. Fashion design first, at Central Saint Martins, which is to say she began at the body's outer edge, at the seam and the hem, the place where a form meets the air. Then New York, where she learned to model clay and translate the figure at the Art Students League, and assisted the painter Pat Lipsky, whose generation had taught colour to behave as a field rather than a description. Then Florence, and the long apprenticeship of looking.

Now Ivanow works from a studio in Teià, half an hour from Barcelona, surrounded by Mediterranean pines and the mineral smell of the sea. Her materials arrive already carrying a life: clay gathered on her travels, ash from burned trees still holding the minerals they absorbed, horse hair, salt, stones worn smooth by the ocean. She does not impose on them. She listens. The forms that emerge feel less designed than discovered, rounded, organic, marked by fire and the trace of her hands. Surfaces that have not been corrected or smoothed. Everything the process left behind, kept.

What she brought home she finished learning nearby. In La Bisbal d'Empordà, the old pottery town inland from the coast, she sat with a ceramist in his eighties and learned how a glaze is formulated, which is a chemistry passed from hand to hand more often than it is written down. With the potter Josep Matés she learned wood firing, and smoke. These are slow inheritances. A glaze recipe is somebody's lifetime, handed over.

Fire is the collaborator she cannot instruct. Her firings run long, up to thirteen hours. Some pieces are finished in raku, the technique developed in sixteenth-century Kyoto for the tea ceremony, in which the work is drawn from the kiln while it is still glowing and allowed to meet the air all at once. The shock is the point. The glaze crazes, the surface opens, and smoke is driven into the cracks so that they darken and become legible. The clay records the violence of the temperature change and keeps it. What looks like damage is the method.

This is worth holding on to when she speaks about cracks. She has said that we spend our lives concealing them, polishing our image. Her sculptures do the opposite. In the fissure she finds possibility. She is not speaking only in metaphor. She has built a practice on a technique that produces breakage on purpose, and then declines to repair it.

Each piece carries the morphology of the body's interior, extending from it as if the form continued past the skin into something larger and quieter. Dense in some places, almost translucent in others. Cracked where the firing pushed too hard. Porous where the clay gave way.

Her sculptures do not illustrate the body. They behave like it. They accumulate sensation before meaning. You read them the way you read a face in low light, not by analysing but by feeling something shift in you before you understand why. The knowledge is erotic.

The body is the first territory we inhabit, the one we never chose, the one we cannot leave, the one whose borders are constantly negotiated by forces outside us.

Her work is poetry made with the hands, pressed and coaxed and fired into something you can stand beside and feel. To encounter it is to be reminded that territory is not only landscape or land. It is skin, it is the space between touch and restraint, it is everything we carry that cannot be mapped.

Berta-Blanca T. Ivanow | Photography by Alisa Ivanenko. Produced by Ira Trofimova.

Berta-Blanca T. Ivanow | Photography by Eli Apezteguia

Artist

Berta-Blanca T. Ivanow

@ombredansleau

Photography

Daniela López

Alisa Ivanenko

Eli Apezteguia

Max Larruy

Laia Rafols

Present at

Tramuntana Gallery

Further

Voy dejando huellas en la tierra que me vio nacer, NOWNESS, Raw Materials series — nowness.com
"In the Studio with Berta-Blanca T. Ivanow", TOAST Magazine — us.toa.st
Corps Messagers, Sainte Anne Gallery, 3 February – 26 March 2022 — sainteannegallery.com
Berta Blanca T. Ivanow at VASTO — vasto.es

Nina Zulian https://pluralmagazine.net

Bodies of Clay

Woven from Memory