Statement
I am from Russia, where ceramics has been considered a second-class discipline among the arts, consigned to functional craftsmanship. But I never felt that ceramics is only about jugs. I always believed the clay as a material was destined to express serious thoughts.
I love ceramics, I feel empathy to it, I appreciate its potential to express a wide range of human thoughts and feelings, that’s why I don’t have one main material or technique.
As an artist in ceramics, I am attracted by the possibility of combining an incompatible, using contrast of materials, juxtaposing the fine and coarse, durable and fragile, living and petrified. I work in various techniques with chamotte, porcelain. In my objects and installations, I use the combination of raw and fired ceramics, sometimes include other substances and even living organisms. Ceramics, as a medium, by virtue of its diversity allows me to embody almost any idea, and firing with its inherent unpredictability brings an external spontaneity that I welcome as a blessing from nature.
— Natalia Khlebtsevich