Workroom in progress

Facing

For this exhibition, Tessa van der Wey presents ceramic heads and upper-body fragments joined with hand-carved wooden bases. Rather than resting on the wood, the ceramic forms flow directly from it—as though the face emerges from the body itself. Each piece is set at the exact eye level of the viewer, demanding a direct encounter rather than a passing glance. Rendered in clay’s own intrinsic colors and textures, these faces carry the nuance of skin, drawing on her family’s ties to West Africa—rooted in her hometown Helmond’s textile industry, and her husband’s family heritage in Togo and France—to form proud, dignified female figures. For this exhibition, she also introduces new experiments in painting directly onto porcelain surfaces.

Draping

For Oori Apparel, a garment is not something that covers the body, but a sculptural entity liberated from it. Her work always begins at a boundary: between the garment being made and the garment waiting to be worn, where human passivity and agency intersect. Fabric drapes, yielding to gravity and endlessly reshaping itself with the body’s movement. The soft beauty born of that flow—the fleeting curves of overlapping, cascading folds—has long captivated Oori Apparel. That surrender is passive, yet the hand that cuts, folds, and makes it stand is always active. In this research, she experiments with carrying that soft, flowing beauty into an unfamiliar material: clay. By fixing the vanishing beauty of a fold in clay, she actively catches and holds what would otherwise passively fall.