CLAY BODIES

Koulis, Elefsina. Panos. Teodoros, Eleusis. Giorgio... These are some of the names given to the unique, coil built vessels culminating in a series called Clay Bodies. Beginning in lockdown and within an extended period of recovery, a spiritualist suggested that being a triple Virgo - Klaus ought to seek a tangible person to earth connection. It started with terracotta.

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Q&A with Curator Osmancan Yerebakan for Sized / Concept Los Angeles Feb 2022

—The story of clay is the story of humanity. How do you approach the immaterial aspect of clay in your work?

Its absolutely primal, and perfect. I’m aware of layered, indeterminate histories as composites. Of millennia, meanderings of substances in the evolution of each clay. I’m obsessively consumed, handling the clay bodies.

— Tell us about your relationship with Greece, both in an everyday level and as a site of exploration and self-searching?

Athens is complex and exhausting. She’s truly stunning. There is incompleteness, unresolved closures to multiple pasts, a lot of contradiction. It’s been nearly 7 years here and I feel like I understand it less now than ever, or perhaps just entirely differently, so its’ internally similar in ways. I recovered here from substance abuse, in a very solitary way in the year before and then during the pandemic which I believe would have taken a lot longer to finally reckon with elsewhere. It was during this time that I began making the neo-rhytons.

My work with ceramics and also fashion textiles evolve convergently, as both outcomes alight away from Greece - contrasting my past in London and Milan. I repeatedly discover how having no local influences from current fashion or design per se, is informing a pretty isolated, yet searching and instinctual body of work.

— What is your day-to-day experience of Athens like and how does that differ from your work in Kerameikos?

I live and work in modern Kerameikos, the old Athenian neighbourhood which is built above the classical Kerameikos. The entire ‘suburban’ area is situated just outside of what once were the ancient city walls where outcast classical potters worked alongside graves lining the roads to Elefsina and Piraeus. Dotted around my neighbourhood are recent and not so recent sectioned off / demolished blocks where digs were / are? sched- uled to happen in this untidy happenstance odd and unprotected way. The entire area is essentially built above important unearthed archaeological remains. The largest mass grave from plague-stricken antique Athens was discovered a few blocks away. I enter the larger formal sites regularly for forms of research but to me there is always the matter-of-fact of the immediate sub terrain, the now-then connection feels very present to me.

— I am curious about your understanding of timelessness as a designer, especially in relationship to contemporary pottery and clay.

I’m pushing technicality in as much as is possible with coil builds and embellishment but perhaps my isolation and constant reckoning with the past of my location anchors the work in an aesthetic fundamentality.

— Panos could have been thousands of years old but the spikes give away the contemporary finish. How do you play with this notion of time in design?

It is less about design and more a metaphysical exploration through past reckoning married to recovery. Panos’ spikes are stunted horns that should have grown in to curling goat-horn handles - which reappear on other pieces, but in this case were cut-short. If time is measured in beginnings and ends I’m borrowing from ephemeral experiences and confirming them in abstract symbolic ways. There are multiple time frames being considered.

— Vessels are bodies, and I can even dare to say they’re queer bodies. They play with use and duality—they defy productivity but hinting a form of function through their orifice. Tell us your vessels as queer bodies.

Panos is at once a portrait of a person I knew from a chequered past, and a Pan-like figure, conjured in a ma- ternal way of radical empathy and concern, a mothers’ child but a divine homosexual invention, a miniature walled-in sanctuary. I’m interested in connecting sparse facts known to us as modern outsiders with imagined outcomes, mythology and new theories from the philosophies in creating these trans organics. Mining from historical Greece and my own experiences assumes a certain queerness in and of itself.

— What about pottery itself: throwing clay to the wheel, coiling, forming the surface. How is your experience of the tactility of the process?

I use coil and plastic sculpting techniques, without mechanisms. I am guided by the substance and process rather than it being architecturally planned out with a rigid outcome. I source from memory for subject matter and have a general idea of shape and size but the process and sensory connection to the material becomes too transfixing to fully control. There is an intimate and intuitive understanding of boundaries, weights, humidities, balances etc but there is a sort of violence and argument between myself and the piece where at certain points the piece refuses me, wants to collapse at its limits, and so I usually abdicate to the clay, the clay eventually becomes the dominant partner in this relationship.

— Do you see pottery as a form of storytelling, especially as a designer invested in the antiquity?

Absolutely

— Tell us your Archimedean approach to design - is it about pursuing a system as much as assuming the chance element?

There is a pursuit of a spiritual application of arithmetic theory. There is a comforting stability in this notion that things change and changes repeat and at once remain the same as they evolve in cycles. Physical coiling from a locus point of initiation symbolises cyclical and repetitive aspects of recovery processes.

— How is your relationship to the cyber space, both as a designer in terms of the future of virtual architectural but as a researcher of the ancient?

The Beazley archive houses hundreds of thousands of mostly Athenian ceramic pieces / fragments in such a way that a single shattered ceramic vessel dislocated and at large, can be reconstructed through the database.

I believe it is the oldest online archive of its’ kind. Painstaking work by obsessed historians has evolved in to a mechanism performing really powerful acts of preservation and reconstitution in a really odd and democratic way. Fully accessible everywhere - its generous archeology done right.

— Finally, how do you approach concept in your process — where does it come into play and what does concept determine for the next step?

When our dialogue began my immediate thoughts centred around conservation potential. I’m obviously very concerned with archeological preservation. I’m interested in what new virtualities could do for archeology and archiving in advance of technological advancements as new facts. NFTs could start to solve real issues with dis- placed antiquities. The trade offs are potentially world-changing in terms of displaced antiquities and - well - keeping everyone happy with their share. Imagine trading a form of an edition of the entire Athenian Acropolis for the reconstitution of the physical Parthenon Marbles. Struggling antiquities departments could start to turn profits - allowing for more evolved field work. Mouthwatering.

I love the idea that with Concept, a future neo-rhyton could be fully digitised - were they to suffer a shattering demise - there is the possibility to clone its digital to physical DNA. A fundamentally delicate ceramic - one already playing with notions of demise and rebirth - made digitally immortal - adds a cyber-spiritual handle to an already multiversal vessel.

—Thank you!