EUGENIA BRACONY

Residents February 2023

Eugenia Bracony is a ceramic artist working predominantly with clay to express concepts of emptiness through objects, structures and installations. The irreducibility of emptiness, or, to be more precise, the space that empty space takes up is an inherent problem of ceramics that she has been concerned with lately. Having worked for many years on functional objects, at some point she realized that without emptiness, functional objects could not exist. she was immediately drawn to the metaphorical possibilities of this condition, which, in consequence led to a group of nonfunctional works. The objects she works with are made through coil building, the method used for centuries in traditional pottery in the North of Argentina and the rest of Latin America. This millenary technique is extremely malleable and allows for all sorts of forms and shapes. On the other hand, the process of coiling illustrates very clearly how the object affects space and how the empty space is an active part of the final result. Emptiness appears to be contained both by the sculptural and functional objects, whereas in the structures I work with emptiness runs through it. These structures are made of modules that expand in order to create a pattern. The negative space that’s necessary to create this sort of fabric is the very force that showcases the fragility of these pieces. All these works seem to express that emptiness, however ungraspable, is far from incorporeal. Manifesting the unattainable and irreducible aspects of space along with the fragility of the materials and the power of the intangible are some of the subjects that my work revolves around. In this sense, she is convinced that clay, in all its possible forms, is an endless source of inspiration for poetic production.

“my bed unmade

my nightstand

a book, my notebook

I see the trace of my movement on the sheets

the pillow with the trace of my body

my being there,

quiet

I vibrate

my thoughts are crowded, ordered and disordered

the mud takes shape

my universe drips and appears all around me

the rest disappears

loses contour

forms without sharpness

muffled sounds reach me

submerged in water

only what I think exists

it appropriates me, it expands and grows"