As it often happens with the most difficult practices, pottery seems easy, but it's not. It looks like everything you need is few gentle touches, and all of a sudden the clay bends to your will.
What remains out of sight is the preparation process, the years of practice, the attempts and the absolutely not negligible physical effort.
What remains out of sight is the preparation process, the years of practice, the attempts and the absolutely not negligible physical effort.
In the very heart of Copenhagen, there's a shop, lowered below the street level as all the others, with a line of bright windows on its top. Inside those walls, a clean showcase of vases of an unmistakable shape, clean and somehow surreal. This place is named Tortus, after the Latin word for 'Turtle’, reflecting the need for a slow and careful production of each handmade piece. The mind behind this reality is Eric Landon.
In and out, two sides of the same art
The front is as clean and tidy as the back gets messy and dusty during the moulding sessions. The two sides of the same coin.
People believe pottery is easy because they stick to the final outcome. A clean and polished product, with little to none hints of the manufacturing process behind it. This leads to equating pottery to an act of pure creation, rather than craftsmanship, and therefore to think about the potter more as a God rather than a human being working with his own hands.
Reality is that those hands get dirty, dry, and tempered with fatigue, and there is no effortless act in any of it.
For each perfectly crafted vase, there might be dozens of broken crocks, left on the ground, forgotten witnesses of the devotion to this art, rather than of failure.
But most likely, the biggest achievement of Eric, besides his creations distributed worldwide, is that of playing a big part in letting people know and get into such a practice, that could have easily be forgotten.
In these modern times of massive and compulsive consumption, creation seems to be owed to few. At the same time, the modern era brought some serious and impressive tools, not useful to mould clay better, but rather to reach a wider audience. Those tools are social media, and Eric knows how to use them as much as a potter wheel.
An endless flow of hypnotic videos, where ceramics are born from the unshaped matter.
In these modern times of massive and compulsive consumption, creation seems to be owed to few. At the same time, the modern era brought some serious and impressive tools, not useful to mould clay better, but rather to reach a wider audience. Those tools are social media, and Eric knows how to use them as much as a potter wheel.
An endless flow of hypnotic videos, where ceramics are born from the unshaped matter.
When it is on the wheel, clay has its own momentum, and instead of going against it, you need to take advantage of it, to the point where it is almost like the potter is just a vessel, ferrying the matter to the shape it belongs to.
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Eric behaves the same, but towards people, reaching out and teaching to those that are willing to learn, helping them to achieve the expertise they might deserve.
It is way too easy to let pottery be a metaphor for life, but it might instead be difficult to remember that behind each vessel placed on a shelf, there are the wise hands of a potter.
It is way too easy to let pottery be a metaphor for life, but it might instead be difficult to remember that behind each vessel placed on a shelf, there are the wise hands of a potter.
C 41 Studio is a collective approaching creativity throughout multiple disciplines. It is built out of young directors, photo- graphers and content creators. We have great ideas and we develop them. K48 is our associated production company.
