THE SYMBIOSIS OF STONEWARE & PORCELAIN
by Dienke Dekker & Daniel Costa
The training of a complementary way of working together led Dienke Dekker and Daniel Costa to a research into stoneware and porcelain, two materials that complement each other. By bringing these materials into physical and chemical relation they finally conduct a collection of stoneware-porcelain meetings.
These meetings and mergings, the prosperous symbiosis of the two materials should be the leading voice in their research.
Deformation, shrinking, translucency, complementary beauty and the stack-ability of their research objects form the outline of the investigation: As porcelain deforms easier than stoneware an organic softness can be achieved. The combination of stoneware and porcelain allows subtle plays with light. Tactile qualities of stoneware complement the smoothness of pure porcelain.
They like to observe the materials in shapes to see their qualities in volumes, to behold the interaction with light and the relation to the 3-dimensional space.
Therefore they have worked out a mould system that can be stacked in different ways allowing them to create assembled shapes in which they can freely play and organise the different layers of stoneware and porcelain. Layers that are independent from the shape. Every casted object has a plug on the top and bottom, allowing the Designers to combine them in the raw state and fire them together into one object, or to fire them separately enabling them to combine the pbjects after the firing to observe amounts and proportions, making the system also applicable to bigger scales.
The research ’The symbiosis of Stoneware and Porcelain’ is an installation and publication.
