The use of materials, the sensory experience accompanying them and the emotions they evoke are the central focus of Guglielmo Brambilla‘s very personal design studies. This multi-faceted designer has worked with many contemporary designers and brands, from Philippe Malouin to Bethan Laura Wood, from Campari Soda to Nike, with experiences working for the Salone del Mobile and a year at the Fabrica Research Center. After studying at Milan Polytechnic, he obtained a master’s degree at the Designskolen Kolding, Denmark, developing a project on ceramics. This was where he fell in love with clay as an artistic medium. With his ceramic creations, he has discovered a way of viscerally exploring his relationship with objects to be shaped, testing his intuitions, ideas and rules. In summer 2022, during the Taattinen Artist Residency (Naantali, Finland) curated by Kirsi Enkovaara, he thoroughly investigated the possibilities afforded by wild clay (mined and directly processed, ed), translated into a series of object in the shape of hooks, handles and simple items to be “gripped”, an almost ancestral passage from the hand of the maker to that of the user.
Why are ceramics so important in your work?
In my opinion, what makes ceramics such an intriguing, attractive material is the fact that much of our built environment is made of ceramic materials: bricks, roof tiles, wall tiles, sanitaryware, plates, knives, cups, vases, as well as more complex, engineered elements like electronic components. Secondly, made of clay, ceramics inevitably bring me back to the ground, considering the origin of this material and its relationship with the ground, with a given environmental context, with the composition of the earth it comes from. Finally, what in my mind makes working with clay so fascinating is the slow pace you are forced to adapt to: we can control some properties of this material, but only up to a certain point.
For example?
The drying process can be forced and accelerated, but if this is too drastic, too fast or not uniform, it will inevitably affect the strength of the final piece. The properties of this material force us to slow down the processing times we are often used to in order to accommodate the very needs of the material.
So you find a personal point of contact in manipulating ceramics in its transforming power?
There is something visceral, primordial, in clay, in working with something so dirty, wet and cold. At the same time, it is so intriguing to see how these properties change in the firing process, so from a cold, damp and soft material we can obtain something that is hard, fragile and resistant, porous and warm, also in terms of colours. Raw clay often has cold shades of blue, grey and black, and becomes almost the opposite: orange, red and so on. This transition makes the material even more charming and valuable, because it is irreversible.
How did you bring these thoughts to your project developed during your time at Taattinen Lake?
The initial idea was to try and explore our process of assigning meaning to materials and objects. In particular, I wanted to try to understand how a handful of earth could take on a given vale, particularly the muddy earth found in the lake. Today I continue to investigate this in Italy, thus broadening my experiments on types of more or less wild clays, with different compositions and origins.
How would you define this approach to the process?
This design approach is more open to imperfections and the acceptance of defects, which ceramics lend themselves to. It is such a sensitive material, there are so many variables that affect the end result, that inevitably it reacts to the context in which it is processed. When you work with clay, you have to consider all its properties, but also the tools you use, the environment, the temperature at which it is processed, the temperature at which it is fired and its position in the kiln (as this affects the final colour of the clay and the glaze). I think that ceramics are perfect for an applying focusing on the exaltation of defects and imperfections, but this can easily apply to other materials too. In the same way that we are able to accept and enjoy these ceramic imperfections, we should be able to accept that plastic yellows and steel pans scratch; these properties help the enhance the character of the object, without necessarily compromising its function or use.
How is the origin of the material an important variable to consider within this framework of acceptance of imperfections?
Working on this project in Finland, where I took the clay directly from the source, was extremely useful for me, because I had never been involved in the actual extraction of the material. I was really fascinated to discover how, in this case, it was practically ready for use, as there was no need for particular refinement or cleaning (aside from a few twigs or shells) in order to process it. Of course this goes only in an artisanal production context.
On one hand, this project helped me to analyse the process of assigning meaning to materials, on the other I was faced with the reality and origins of the materials we work with. In my own small way, the idea is therefore to always enhance the material and the place it comes from as much as possible, bringing life to objects that form solid bonds firstly with their designer and, thereafter, with their owners.
