Artist's Statement

I think that to choose the adventure of being an independant artist, one has to be a bit reckless, have the strength to struggle, like balancing acts, and have the courage, from time to time, to leap out into the void, in the hope of landing ... softly...
Contemporary society is not very interested in what we have to say.
We live at a time when preference is given to fire-works, to fashion, and to instant gratification. All of that is to the detriment of a poetry which calls on our intimate pulsations, on the alertness of our spirit and senses, and on our bonds with mystery.
My desire, through the use of clay, to talk about how I feel arises from a fascination with this responsive material, a material which welcomes each of our gestures and allows the development, from scratch, of fully realized forms in space. It is a fascination with watching colour arise out of fire, colour merging with form, and the actual realization, within one work, of a unity between both sculptor and painter.
In this disconcerting world where man is in the process of drastically losing touch with nature, the universe, and even the cosmos, I am searching, through ceramics - a material of earth, water, air and fire-to touch the pulse of the mysteries of nature, and of those within ourselves.
I recount those surges in matter as it goes in search of lost space, of structures which are born compact within the earth only to be teased out, more and more subtly, into fragile and filigreed forms in space.
It is the dream of the ethereal, of flight.
I relate stories of strange islands of lava and the sea which loom up suddenly to darken the horizon, or those of the sun at its apex rendering abstract all vertical and cutting shadows, tales situated way beyond night and forms revealed only at dawn.
There are rainbow coloured sails, gliding on waves where the compass and the map do not guide one back to life's tranquil shores but out to adventure, on to mystery, the elusive, perpetual change, and metamorphoses arising from the potency of nature or of inexhaustible fantasies.
It is the rainbow route, a route of instinct leading way beyond the furthest horizon, a surreal adventure in which anything and everything is possible, even with wings of clay. In spite of everything, I still believe in fairy tales. And in many, many other things...

Petra Weiss