Oxana Geets: sculptor pushing the boundaries of ceramic art

Every year there are many talented artists with bright works appear in the art world scene, but their names quite often remain in the shadow of other more famous creators. Afisha.London magazine is going to tell more about young contemporary artists that require your attention. The hero of this article is Oxana Geets, a mixed-technique sculptor, whose works are inspired by natural materials.

Oxana Geets was born in a small town on the border with China, where she spent her childhood and youth. This was a dying district in Far East region, where she was observing the degradation and decay of her home place, so typical situation for 90-s of the last century. Luckily in the 2000s, she started as the art student at the Amur State University, department of Applied and Decorative Arts with her main specialization was in ceramics.

Geets tells about the experience of studying at the university: “Due to the extremely meagre material base, we worked with materials of very poor quality on old equipment. Working with clay that is practically unusable for its intended purpose has formed in me a very deep feel for the characteristics of the material and the ability to work confidently with the most capricious clay bodies.”

The artist’s forcibly developed ability to interact deeply with the material influenced the choice of ceramics as the main medium. According to art critic Juliet Sarkisian, such freedom in handling the material leads to sophisticated experiments in search of the limits of possibilities, which are extremely wide for clay as a medium.

Oxana Geets is a mixed-technique sculptor who creates the art of glazed and multi-layered ceramic works. The artist’s raw sculptures are inspired by natural materials — for example, a cocoon, an egg or a seed. Geets strives to depict states of metamorphosis and conflict, as well as the passage of time in her works, using such fragile materials as clay and porcelain. Based on her experience exploring the natural beauty of the earth, her work is inspired by bizarre volcanic landscapes, earthen depressions, remote bright rainforests, protected barrier reefs and exotic animals.

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The vessels are created by the additive superposition of one material on another. Each vessel starts with a small cylinder. Then the works are coated with glaze and fired with colour and accumulated texture; these steps are repeated, and one work can go through the process of several firing. Thus, each work differs in both form and external structure.

Thanks to careful research of the process and material, Geets’s works, in the opinion of Juliet Sarkisian demonstrate a high level of knowledge in the field of ceramic production and a confident sense of colour, but at the same time resist the formal and technical limitations of traditional ceramics, exploring new territories of freedom and creativity.

As Aleksey Pro_ject notes, Oxana’s work balances on the verge of the fictional and the material, in her sculptures there are features inherent in mythological characters from different cultures and time layers harmoniously intertwined with the features of existing animals. An inspiration and a reference point for Oxana is modern Japanese artistic ceramics. Among the authors inspiring the artist are Akiyama Yo and Kenji Gomi.

We hope you enjoyed the ceramics of Oxanа!

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