Ceramic objects that piece together fragments of pasts and speculative futures into contemporary artefacts
Artist Statement
Sterre Troquay treats ceramics as time capsules: objects that connect us to a distant past while carrying stories of the present into the future.
Her work collages aesthetics from both directions – the jewelled chalices of the Middle Ages, bolted metal plates referencing machinery and armour, the bright optimism of 1960s retro-futurism.
These stylistic collisions picture a present in which the internet has flattened cultural history and made ancient past and speculative future equally available as raw material for identity. The results read as relics and gadgets at once and therefore are very much of the present.
Working in small series, Troquay sets contrasting surfaces against one another – metallic and lava-stone glazes alongside saturated yellows and pinks – so that a single object can appear both excavated and newly manufactured. The pieces remain functional, sitting deliberately between usable object and sculpture.
Bio
Sterre Troquay is a contemporary ceramicist (b.2000), based in Amsterdam. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, graduating in 2021. And since then has specialised in ceramics.
Each piece is wheel-thrown and altered by cutting and adding, allowing traces of making to remain visible. The results are unique pieces that exist between function and sculpture.
Alongside her studio practice, Troquay runs Pottery Party, a low-threshold pop-up ceramics workshop in Amsterdam.
Process
Sterre throws the initial shape on the wheel. After that starts a process of altering the pot by cutting lines and shapes and adding elements onto the surface. In many cases coloured slips or terra sigillata are added before bisque firing. The piece is then finished with glazes and underglazes in the second, glaze, firing.
throwing the form
altering it and applying slip
the first, bisque, firing
applying the glaze
final piece removed from kiln