“Polystyrene, Shibari&Co.”brings together new pieces by Morgane Tschiember, all of them ceramics. They are there sult of a recent so journ in Italy, where the Nuove group gives artists in residence Access to the historical and technical expertise of local companies and the materials and age-old traditions of Nove, a small town in the Veneto which has specialised in ceramics since the 17th century.

If the series of Works titled “Polystyrene” uses the eponymous and highlyin flamma­ble contemporary material in minimalist Works that invert the relation between fullan dempty – not least because polystyrene is 98% air – the “Shibari” series uses more traditional or even archaicmaterials, but treatedbythe artist in a very distinc­tive way. For, as the Japan eseword of their title in dicates, but only to those aware that it means “tobind,” these pieces in volvetying. After spinning but before firing some of these claypieces, Tschiember literally bound them. This strange “kneading,” in which the pottery is “caged” in various kinds of rope produced surface burns and contortions, invaginations and other deformities in this exclusive material, clay, which is considered the great primamateria.

In doing this, Tschiember was being iconoclastic in at least three different ways. With regard to traditional ceramics, first of all, whether functional or luxurious. But also with regard to a Japanese ritual and martial art of bondage which was origi­nally military but has recently developed into an erotic art: kinbaku. And, finally, with regard to the Jomon period in Japan (10,000–300 BCE), known not only for it scord-impression pottery, but also as marking the end of the so-called Palaeolithicpre-ceramicperiod.

“Polystyrene, Shibari&Co.” Derives from a consummate art of elips is that is at once historical and geographical, somatic and erotic, plastic and symbolic. With the materials at hand, Tschiember is proceeding very much in the manner of Alain Resnais in his short film Le Chantdustyrène(1958), which, in a little less than fifteen minutes, goes through all the phases of production of a plastic bowl, going back from the effect (the result) to the cause (the raw material), but also conflates classical poetry and avant-garde literature: “I had the vague sense that there was a relation between the Alexandrine and Cinemascope.”