How to capture poetry
- Lotte makes ceramic vessels inspired by intangibles
- She embraces the irregularities that occur during firing
- Her objects appeal to both sight and touch
Lotte Westphael’s ceramic pieces flow and float yet appear solid at the same time. She finds inspiration in architecture, textile art and classical music and seeks to fuse these disparate elements in her ceramic shapes. Lotte’s cylinders are built of thin strips of porcelain cut and reassembled, creating a distinct and unique design in colour displacement. The colour patterns are meticulously planned, but her process is open to the irregularities that creep in during the final phases of creation. "With every addition of a new colour, cracks can occur." But this offsetting of perfection is what gives Lotte's pieces their complexity and beauty.
Discover her work
INTERVIEW
I believe you have to cultivate your senses to experience beauty. My pieces are made of thin porcelain – put them in the sun and they suddenly radiate. Beauty arrives when we invite forces outside of ourselves to work with us.
My work is a dialogue between my will and that of the porcelain. In the beginning, I strove to create the perfect circle, but the firing phase created small distortions. I no longer view these as failures; instead, this is where beauty seeps in.
Syncopation is rhythmic displacement. For me, it means disrupting the pattern. Being open to the material and the inaccuracy of technique takes my pieces to unknown places. I am influenced by architecture and music: architecture is frozen music, and music is liquid architecture.
I come from a Danish tradition as regards simplicity and colour, but I’m inspired by structural and tactile expressions of textile art, and I strive to merge the two in my work. I design and build patterns that make up the piece itself. The pattern is not a decorative element.
