Broken Circle – Broken Beauty
Venice Biannual for Architecture 2021
Ceramic work. Size 3×4 m.
Circle cuts: 70x80cm
Painted with Terra Sigillata colours and fired at 1100 degrees C.
For many years Anne Fløche’s work has been inspired by themes of space and time, geological creation, clouds, the elements, and the circular and elliptical movements of planets, with insights from astronomers, particle physicists and many other scientists. This has resulted in her simple, sign-like imagery and the writing of phrases; writing itself being sign-like.
In continuation of this inspiration she has created the present work.
The disturbed and disrupted circle.
A disrupted circle is equivalent to disrupted beauty.
A work of spread-out circle-cuts, made of rough materials, treated impulsively yet with precision, painted in beautiful colours; all basically created from earth and fire.
Insisting on the beauty of it all in our Anthropocene Age, in spite of our cognition of the most serious and overwhelming disturbances of basic balances on our planet.
This new work draws on the contradiction of the stylised and intended harmonious striving of ceramic elements, and the chaos of the broken circle; our factual present and future in basic terms.
She is also drawing on the fact of the Circle being an important sign in the visual life of so many cultures on planet Earth, representing Wholeness, Perfectness, the immense Void, the Centre.
The process of giving months of work and thinking away to the heat of the kiln and accepting the outcome, also tells of our human terms and limitations on Earth.
Years of working and experimenting with clays, feldspars, coloured earths and other elementary materials has given Anne Fløche a strong sense of interest in and connectedness to the geological processes. She aims to maintain the expression of the raw basic clay as well as of the refined white porcelain painting-colour.
She works with low-fired ceramic boards as well as three-dimensional pieces and, due to her special mixture of clay, is able to create large formats, decorated with colours rooted in the ancient tradition of terra sigillata.