Claudia Biehne her studio. Photo © Maxime Ballesteros
“I want to create something of longevity. Something that can be dug up in 2000 years and will still look the same,” explains Leipzig-born artist Claudia Biehne, who has been working exclusively with porcelain for the past nine years in her studio in the Spinnerei. “We live in an age where the disposing of things is cultivated. We feel great when we recycle something but the fact that we have just thrown something away doesn’t change. It’s really painful when my work breaks but this feeling of loss is a real feeling and it makes you treat objects differently.”
Biehne’s porcelain artefacts constantly blur the line between art and design, as they are sometimes functional, but at other times highly conceptual and process focused. In either case Biehne’s porcelain objects aren’t mass produced and each have their own unique property, be it in the form of uncontrollable cracks or imprints of dried leaves and crumbled paper. “I want to experiment with destruction and disturbances while creating something that is so beautiful that one wants to take care of it and keep forever.”
Read more about Claudia Biehne and Sleek’s trip from Berlin to Vienna via Leipzig and Prague in the Winter issue of Sleek, publishing next month. Find out more information on The Search at mb! by Mercedes-Benz.