Man with a blindfold 2020
Initialized by the novel “Killing Commendatore” by Haruki Murakami, which tells the story of a portrait painter, I began to work on a series of life-size portrait busts. It isn´t an illustration of the novel, but I followed the working method of the author and the fictional painter, immersing myself in the detailed description of a person, its clothing, and expression. Like the novel´s protagonist, I was working just with photographs and my impression of a person. It is not about rebuilding the forms of reality in clay. It is about showing something that is hidden behind it. In my “ceramic storytelling” stories and photos, questions, personal topics, colors, or observations merge and condense during the working process into one image. The person that I have chosen is not attractive: I focussed on his inner beauty for he is a reader, thinker, and writer. His world bases on his sensitivity to arts and language. He is looking inside/ under the surface and doesn´t need his eyes for this.
Echo and Narcissus 2020
Both figures are also part of my “Magic Reality” series in which I processed portraits. The depicted people are people with whom I was in contact. This is the only narrative bracket that connects the portrayed people with one another.
I stumbled over the story of “Narcissus and Echo”, a mythological story about vanity, self-centeredness, rejection, and despair. I am fascinated by the mythological stories and their precise psychology. Everybody knows a Narciss, everybody knows an Echo or can reflect the own person in this story. No matter how far the humankind will go, these stories will never disappear.
My two figures are a trial to transform the mythological content in a contemporary context. The smartphone and the headset as well as the bathing clothes are transferring Narciss and Echo to our time as well as they speak about vanity and self-centeredness in general.
Corona Short Stories III 2021
The size of the representation influences the depth of the narrative: For example, my miniatures, in which I processed the time since 2020 in small scenes, I named `Short Stories´ because they tell faster and more strikingly. In opposite to this, the portrait series is in this point of view a kind of ceramic `novel´. While the large works were thematically very open, but accurate and true to detail, the smaller representations are ideal for getting topics on the point. I started the Mini-project more for fun and hadn´t planned to make meanwhile the third series. But it more and more fascinated me to shrink a work to such a small size: It requires some different technique, and it affects the kind of telling a story. And somehow, it allowed being on a distance to the current Covid problem…as if these scenes were like far away, like seen through a field glass.
The miniatures titles from left to right:
Bernie, Click & Collect, Ischgl,
Maria Kolesnikova, Myanmar, Stay at home
Note: The text above was written by the Artist. No modification was made by COCA.
Stephanie Marie Roos
Germany
Stephanie M. Roos works as a freelance figurative ceramic artist since 2012 and her work was shown on international level like the Premio Faenza in Italy, the Westerwald Prize (Germany), the GICB 2017 (South Korea) or the Taiwan Ceramics Biennale 2020.
Honorary award at Unicum 2015/ Slovenia, Honourable Mention at Ceramica Multiplex 2016/ Croatia, First Prize at Southwest German Ceramic Prize 2017, Bronze Award at “1st Lotus Mountain Prize 2019” in Changchun/ China, Honourable Mention at Cluj International Ceramics Biennale (CCB) and a Special Prize at Taiwan Ceramics Biennale 2020 (TCB). Her figurative work is collected by the MiC Faenza in Italy, the State Museum Karlsruhe in Germany, the KOCEF Collection in Icheon/ Korea, the Latvia International Ceramics Biennale Collection in Latvia, the Changchun International Ceramics Gallery in China, the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan and private collections.
Since 2018 Stephanie Roos is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics.