Geert Van der Borght

After more than forty years of working in the field of ceramics, more than half of which as a potter, I now create pots and sculptural shapes alternately. The realization that not all sculptures are pots, but that each pot can be seen primarily as a shape, helped me to process clay more freely.

My sculptural work consists mainly of forms (initially turned) on which multiple facets and surfaces (planes) unite around an empty center.  I seek to express in this way the different aspects of our personality that are often fragmented and that risk dispersing without the centripetal force that brings us back to our center. In my more functional work, tea bowls and other containers, I use ash glazes, Shino and rock glazes on top of each other. This gives them greater depth in terms of tone and texture.

This accumulation of layers seems to me to parallel what happens in life, in which most of our experiences connect multiple dimensions and which are never alone. Rather, it is a complex network of grade crossings and connections. In this way, each piece is a moment, captured in time and space, marked with the seal of uniqueness, of a unique and irreplaceable expression in the material in which different realities are manifested.

My best tea bowls are born in a flow, a movement when I spontaneously decorate them with plant shapes or more abstract patterns that evoke nature in all its beauty and ephemerality. After years of hesitation and almost unconscious practice my hand found its way to freer expression, as suddenly a kind of dam is released. GVDB.