Leeuwarder Courant – Culture section – Tuesday 20 May 2008
Ceramic refuges in Lawei
Drachten – In her native Portugal, Sofia Beça is a famous ceramist, but in the Netherlands she is as yet an unknown celebrity. Perhaps her exhibition in de Galerij van de Lawei can change this situation.
Her work is now exhibited in this gallery at the invitation of Paulien Ploeger, this year’s guest curator in Drachten. Ploeger aims to introduce the work of artists from lesser known parts of Europe to the public. Last year, for example, she organised an exhibition of Lithuanian felt art in the Museum Smallingerland.
The exhibition in De Galerij is called ‘From womb to tomb – refuges and habitats’. It is Beça’s belief that the life of both man and animal, from womb to tomb, is a continuous search for shelter.
This shelter can either be a refuge, a real cave or in a more broader sense a habitat, the living environment in which a creature feels safe and secure.
Beça presents a large number of fairly small ceramic sculptures, all based on natural examples. They can nearly always be connected with concepts such as ‘taking shelter’, or ‘hiding’, though in some cases this is more clearly expressed than in others.
The installation ‘Floresta Portuguesa’ forms the centre of the exhibition and consists of fifty ceramic tree trunks. They symbolize the forest of course, a nearly archetypal shelter.
In some cases Beça has combined dozens of smaller objects into one large wall sculpture, as with ‘Habitats’, the exhibition’s opening work. In this work she closely studies the life of insects, which largely takes place in secret. You can see depositions of eggs, feeding trails of caterpillars and the entrances of formicaries.
In the large wand sculpture ‘Borboletear’ you can see forms that suggest butterflies and flying insects, but which are built up out of fragments reminiscent of snail shells that have been cut sideways. These are refuges once again.
Beça works with unglazed ceramics, therefore earth colours dominate the exhibition. The dominant colour is a deep red, a colour normally associated with Spain and Portugal as well.
Those colours are in complete harmony with the organic design of her work, which radiates a pleasant austerity because of this.
The ceramic exhibition in de Lawei can be visited until Saturday.
Sytse Singelsma
Ceramic refuges in Lawei
Drachten – In her native Portugal, Sofia Beça is a famous ceramist, but in the Netherlands she is as yet an unknown celebrity. Perhaps her exhibition in de Galerij van de Lawei can change this situation.
Her work is now exhibited in this gallery at the invitation of Paulien Ploeger, this year’s guest curator in Drachten. Ploeger aims to introduce the work of artists from lesser known parts of Europe to the public. Last year, for example, she organised an exhibition of Lithuanian felt art in the Museum Smallingerland.
The exhibition in De Galerij is called ‘From womb to tomb – refuges and habitats’. It is Beça’s belief that the life of both man and animal, from womb to tomb, is a continuous search for shelter.
This shelter can either be a refuge, a real cave or in a more broader sense a habitat, the living environment in which a creature feels safe and secure.
Beça presents a large number of fairly small ceramic sculptures, all based on natural examples. They can nearly always be connected with concepts such as ‘taking shelter’, or ‘hiding’, though in some cases this is more clearly expressed than in others.
The installation ‘Floresta Portuguesa’ forms the centre of the exhibition and consists of fifty ceramic tree trunks. They symbolize the forest of course, a nearly archetypal shelter.
In some cases Beça has combined dozens of smaller objects into one large wall sculpture, as with ‘Habitats’, the exhibition’s opening work. In this work she closely studies the life of insects, which largely takes place in secret. You can see depositions of eggs, feeding trails of caterpillars and the entrances of formicaries.
In the large wand sculpture ‘Borboletear’ you can see forms that suggest butterflies and flying insects, but which are built up out of fragments reminiscent of snail shells that have been cut sideways. These are refuges once again.
Beça works with unglazed ceramics, therefore earth colours dominate the exhibition. The dominant colour is a deep red, a colour normally associated with Spain and Portugal as well.
Those colours are in complete harmony with the organic design of her work, which radiates a pleasant austerity because of this.
The ceramic exhibition in de Lawei can be visited until Saturday.
Sytse Singelsma
(with picture of ‘Borboletear’ – wall sculpture of Sofia Beça, to be seen in de Galerij van de Lawei)
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