Veronika Horlik

My ceramic sculpture work focuses on Forestry landscape, and Nature’s cycles of re-generation in the face of industrial incursion and destruction. Here an air of devastation mixes with the strength and beauty of nature, allowing for the possibility of magnificent regeneration. This phenomenon, drawn from the forest landscape and reflected in my work and its artistic goal, mirrors our human condition: moments of dejection and despair are only transitory as re-growth and renewal is always just around the corner.

My ceramics practice is fundamentally craft-based. I consider the transformation of clay (as raw material), and all of the steps involved in this transformation (into ceramic), as part of the meaning imbued in the final work. I labor within the framework of David Pye’s Workmanship of Risk concept, in which “the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as (s)he works”. The work has the potential to be lost, transformed, or mutated at each and every step of the way. This wonderfully long and often precarious process of transforming clay into a ceramic medium allows space for intent and ideas to incubate, develop, and blossom.

The conception and shaping of my material are intertwined, where I can think with my hands and where I am conscious of both the interior space and exterior form of a piece, with the universes of materiality, intent and thought. Without this, my practice would remain stagnant.

— Veronika Horlik

Veronika Horlik, MA (McGill University), MFA (NSCAD), is a Canadian artist and managing co-founder of Studio de céramique Alexandra. She has exhibited widely across Canada as well as in Rome (Italy). She is Ceramics Visual Arts faculty at John Abbott College, and Art Education faculty at McGill University. In 2015 she was awarded the RBC Emerging Artist People’s Choice Award for her work PROUNS(SLASH). Veronika Horlik is presented in the 2018 Virginia McClure Ceramics Biennale (Westmount, Québec, Canada) with the first manifestation of her work Project One Hundred Jars For Oscar.