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The “MUDERNISM” collection celebrates prehistoric design icons, glazed with materials extracted from modern wastewater treatment. All pieces are handmade at the designer’s studio in Amsterdam.
All living species drink water, but we as humans elevated ourselves above plants and animals by designing objects in which we give shape to the water before we drink it.
Archaeologists discovered ceramic designs from around 6368 Before Present buried in the Dutch earth. Studio Billie van Katwijk pays homage to this pioneering Dutch design with a reimagining of a classic: the funnel beaker. We glaze the ancient mudshape with the residue of latest scientific explorations.
MUDERNISM is a glaze. The thin layer that separates us from our earliest ancestors. MUDERNISM consists of the most modern mud that we can distill from water: Kaumera. MUDERNISM gives you a hyper-prehistoric drinking experience.
We are part of the cycle of water. We are temporary containers. We’ve always been and always will be.
MUDERNISM is an ongoing project. Studio Billie van Katwijk is currently researching different by products of the wastewater purification process. Billie also works on site specific projects connecting with local clay, heritage and wastewater.
13x13x8
0.2
Ceramics, Kaumera
2020
natural, Orange
Netherlands
Conceptual product designer Billie van Katwijk is fascinated by nature: that endlessly shapeshifting, growing, blooming, dying, sprouting, phenomenon. From these natural cycles all sorts of materials emerge. Some are treasured (gold, oil, diamonds) while other materials remain unseen or unappreciated. Billie van Katwijk unravels the beauty of these materials. Slaughterhouse-waste becomes a luxury-leather, a residue from the sewer shows its hidden colors when turned into a glaze. Cremation ashes are transformed in a delicate porcelain. Van Katwijk believes in showing contradictions and taboos, but she doesn’t judge. Her projects seduce people to think and to engage in a dialogue. “My concepts are completed by the user, with his or her own thoughts.”
Currently there exists a group of designers who have reintroduced the vitality of craft into Turkish design. Their work is a continuation of the craft techniques adapted to contemporary fabrication. Importantly, they have also reorganized the symbolic potential of local Turkish craft, working directly with craftspeople who are more centrally involved in the creation of these designs. Designers working as collaborators with these craftspeople invigorate design and, at the same, using the means of handcraft, rejuvenate the symbolic import of design through a focus on gesture, form, and technique revealing a latent symbolism organically driven through process. This focus on touch leads to another feature of Turkish design: the imperfect gesture. Gestures ranging from the perfect to the imperfect are an important factor in the final form of an object. They determine the shape and contours of objects in their realization, and have an underlying iconic potency. For thousands of years, the performance of the hand in cutting, shaping, molding, and chiseling materials was the key factor in the final form of many objects. The hand’s capabilities and limitations guided the process in which function was realized, and also resulted in the aesthetics and stylization of the object, generating what can be described as “latent symbolic force”. The aesthetic and stylistic symbolism connects the object to its maker and designers giving a sense of authorial identity and originality to each work. The designer and craftsperson collaboratively and cooperatively realize this design, thus connecting to the symbolic potential of craft and objects. With geometry and pattern as a basis, form is realized within the material production of design, its techniques, and material constraints, resulting in what we can loosely term as the idiom of Turkish design in this synthesis of symbol and craft.
