ceramics, feedback and grief
My mother and I had been experimenting with merging our artistic practices, bringing together her ceramics and my sound art research. We began by incorporating homemade electronics, contact microphones, and speakers into the sculptures she had created—something bell-shaped, with holes through which the cables could be threaded. We crocheted around the ceramics so we could hang the sculptures. We were interested in the contrast—the hardness of clay and the softness of wool. We sought feedback and resonance: a sculpture with a microphone aimed at a sculpture with a speaker to create a feedback loop.
We dreamed of an installation in which these ceramic sculptures would be activated by the resonant frequencies of a room, and by the people moving around the sculptures. In part, the sculptures would also serve as a kind of amplified idiophone made of clay. Since she was fascinated by the ocean, we imagined an underwater scenario and wondered what it might sound like on the ocean floor. We researched how sound travels underwater and how much marine animals rely on sound for navigation. Our next step was to create ceramic sculptures made specifically for this project. However, we never got that far. In April 2024, my mother passed away unexpectedly from an aneurysm. One day she was still with us; the next, she was taken to a hospital. I flew across the Atlantic, but she never opened her eyes again. I decided to continue working on the installation in her memory, as I inherited many of her finished and unfinished ceramic pieces.
In 2025 I was awarded the Klangkunst Recherche Stipendium to develop this work. I decided to focus on working with feedback because I associate certain feedback frequencies that vibrate within the body with the grief of losing a loved one—a piercing, visceral sound. I used transducers and microphones to create feedback loops, that were filtered and modulated through the movement of the ceramic pieces on wooden boards and zitherns. With the lower frequencies the wood would vibrate so much that it would make the ceramics dance and excite the strings on the zither. It was a performance that required quite a lot of control: the ceramics are so fragile and I was bringing them to the point of shaking so much that they might fall off and break. I presented the result of this research in January 2026 at studio54.
I am currently recipient of the Bildende Kunst Recherche Stipendium, to further develop the installation. I am now working towards a sound piece where I do not necessarily have to play the installation, but that the movement of people in the room will influence the feedback frequencies. I am also turning some of the ceramic pieces into speakers, using lace doilies that belonged to my mother and to my grandmother as membranes.
