Catarina Nunes

Ceramicist

A new relationship with ceramics

Catarina's work has an aesthetic or conceptual link to her surroundings
Her work is influenced by the time she spent in Japan
She teaches ceramics at an art school in Lisbon

Catarina Nunes studied ceramics at ESAD in Lisbon, and later took a master's in fine art in Tokyo under master Kimpei Nakamura. She also studied ceramic and glass design at the University of Central England in Birmingham. “I chose ceramics because I was in love with this material," she says. “It was very mouldable but at the same time it had a life of its own. That, for me, triggered a line of conceptual thinking about the material and its possibilities, which developed from thinking about the changes of the material, and the relationship of this material with our body, with our desires, with our expectations of it.”

Interview

How did your Japanese experience influence your work?: A new relationship with the world emerged when I lived in Japan. The study of the tea ceremony, intrinsically related to Zen philosophy and Wabi-Sabi, opened the door to question, confrontation and acceptance of the ephemerality of ceramics as a sculptural element.
In what way are you influenced by where you live?: For a long time my aesthetic inspiration was linked to an aquatic sensibility, since I spent much of my life near the coast or on islands (Azores, Japan, England). When I did an artist-in-residency programme in Namibia in 2015, I was seduced by the wind, the aridity and the rocky surfaces, and I started to explore this different, almost opposite world.
Where else do you find inspiration?: I am most inspired by the ways we can relate to art objects; how we perceive them, why we cannot touch them. I make my objects in order to challenge this dogma and how the public perceives these objects when they can touch them.
What defines your contemporary approach to ceramics?: It's about the relationship between the public and the object. Sometimes it's only a beautiful piece, but if you touch it, it produces sound, like my Kodama project. Sometimes it's an object that you can slip under, like the Cerafuton, a blanket entirely made from ceramic tiles.

Catarina Nunes is a master artisan: she began her career in 2001 and she started teaching in 2006