CERAMICS IN FOCUS: ANNABEL CUCUZ

Building an anachronistic visual world with her shifting sculptural forms, each piece offers a flowing sensibility that offers a style that is as versatile as it is elegant. With subtle, unglazed finishes to celebrate and honour the earthy and organic aesthetic of the clay, each of Annabel’s pieces pay homage to the natural world through their graceful, biophilic forms.

We sit down with Annabel Cucuz to discuss her history with pottery, her work and how ceramics has impacted her life ahead of the launch of the END. x adidas Ultraboost OG 1.0 “Ceramic Craze” sneaker on 20th August.

What initially led you to the world of ceramics?

I was born and grew up in Staffordshire, which is the ceramic hub of the UK, along with Cornwall, so I always grew up around the pottery industry. There’s a lot of pottery factories in Stoke on Trent, for example, which is near where my parents live. I studied sculpture at university, making pieces that were almost like large scale versions of vases. It was quite strange, because I went backwards from making sculptures that were like vases to actually making vases. When I graduated in 2020 into the pandemic, it helped me make my work smaller because I was no longer able to access the studio, so I had to readapt my practice. It was a natural progression - from growing up in Staffordshire to making work about interiors to creating work out of ceramics for interiors.

What is it about pottery and ceramics as a medium that inspires you?

It’s so intuitive - it’s almost like you are a part of the piece that you are making because you use your whole body when you’re making and you’re so involved in the process yourself. You could basically use no tools if you wanted to, as they act as an extension of your hands really. I love how meditative it is and how involved you are when you’re pressing the clay. It’s such a beautiful thing to do and I feel very lucky to have found it as a practice and gone down that route. Despite having worked with other mediums in the past, I feel like I’ve found my thing now. I’m a ceramicist and was always supposed to be one. I’m surprised that I didn’t find it earlier. There are so many mediums and avenues you could go down, so it’s hard to know what you’ll click with.

How would you define your style and approach to ceramics?

Style wise, I would describe it as modernist, abstract and minimal. I don’t use glazes, all of my work is very natural looking. I like the organic finish of clay. Because my work isn’t functional and it’s there to be sculptural, it doesn’t really need to be glazed. I enjoy the matte, natural finish of clay that makes it feel very earthy and stony. The shapes are quite organic and natural, in a sense. When I was at university, I read a book called “As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste” by Penny Sparke, and there was a chapter where she was talking about this series from the ‘90s called “Signs of the Times”, which visited couples in the UK to talk about their interior tastes. There was a couple where the husband was an architect and the wife was housewife, and in the book, Penny Sparke talks about the wife who goes to the children’s nursery to cry because it is the only room in the house that the husband allows her to have curtains in because they have such opposing tastes. I read this chapter, so I decided to watch the show, and I became so obsessed with looking at these interiors from the ‘90s and how weirdly nostalgic and strangely comforting it is to look at these people’s homes. That was when I started looking at interior design and design in general from the latter half of the 20th Century, and how much of it was designed to look futuristic. I was really intrigued by this idea, looking back at design from the mid Century that was looking forward. That became the basis of my practice, I wanted to make spaces and objects that felt misplaced in time. I looked a lot at different film sets of films that were set in the near future of the time – like A Clockwork Orange – so I used that as a springboard, and would watch these films and take inspiration from shapes, like the milk bottle in ACO. Then I saw a Mark Leckey exhibition called “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things”, which compiled random objects that you can’t quite place but they seem familiar, this strange displacement is the basis on which I create my work. I wanted to make work that could be from any period, within reason.

Ceramics and pottery have been made for centuries, with the practice dating back over 25,000 years – why do you think the medium has remained so present within culture for such an extended period?

I think it’s because it’s something that is of the earth, and it lasts so long. We still have ancient vessels in musuems. I know that we’ll still have plastic 25,000 years from now, which is awful, but there’s something that makes you feel ok with clay. While we have preserved many of these pieces, you could still grind down the clay and return it to the earth if you wanted to. I think that everyone who does ceramics loves it so much as a practice. It’s something that gets passed down from one generation to the next. You get so involved in the making. With clay, you could pick up a lump of clay from the earth and make a pot, but you couldn’t pick up a stone and make something functional out of it without tools. It’s something that will always be an intuitive thing to play with. It’s so unique, in that it comes soft, you make something out of it, you let it set and then you fire it – it’s a process that is incomparable. It’s completely transformable – it’s amazing.

Made with natural materials by hand, the process of making ceramics seems tied to the natural world - how does the natural world inspire the forms you create?

It's something that grounds it more. When you hear the background on my work, you’d imagine that it would be made from man-made materials and look like it should be in Blade Runner. Whilst I’m interested in that from a conceptual perspective, I love being connected to the earth and being outdoors, so I guess many things inspire my practice. It’s ultimately an amalgamation of all the different things that inspire me, like going on long walks, the landscape and artists like Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. I think that coming from a fine art background and going into craft, that has made me marry these things together. I see my practice as an art practice married with a craft. So much tradition is tied to it, so much ritual. It’s so related to our everyday lives in ways that other materials aren’t, as we make plates, cups and bowls - things that we use daily. It always will be. It’s so tied into our everyday lives. It’s a primal connection really.

The END. x adidas Ultraboost OG "Ceramic Craze" will launch online via END. Launches on 20th August.