Analog.y

Deeply influenced by studio pottery and the European tradition of porcelain, Laurin Schaub finds inspiration in the world of art and design. In his latest work, ANALOG.Y, he explores the dialogue between digital design and craftsmanship. A contemporary reflection for a new ceramic language.

“In my current work ‘ANALOG.Y’ I use both, my laptop and the pottery-wheel equally. It is a juxtaposition of two ways of thinking. On the one hand, I use digital tools to simplify processes. On the other hand, I transfer a certain digital aesthetic to the craft, which complicates this massively. I am not interested to optimize production processes but to reflect on a aesthetic language for the pottery of today.”

In addition to conventional pottery and glaze techniques, Laurin Schaub also uses specially developed surface finishes as well as ceramic digital printing, laser cutters, cnc foil cutters and sandblasters. The combination of the different techniques makes it possible to make the surfaces look as if they were created in an image editing program like Photoshop. Unlike on the screen, the surfaces have a material color depth and sharply cut relief structures. Despite the high complexity of the techniques, the objects in themselves seem self-evident, the lengthy manufacturing process is not obvious.

Laurin Schaub uses repetitive, graphic patterns and letters as surface design. Written words that flow around the vases are additional information about the object. There, you can find color tags of the individual glazes or protocol extracts from the manufacturing process such as: “last edited 13.07.2019 16:12”. All these patterns and texts are taken from a digital logic and transferred to the manual process. Thus one finds the manual manufacturing process of a vessel as command codes logged. With this mix of characteristics Laurin Schaub offers a different view of digital and manual logic.