During her residency in the Ceramic Workshop, Daniela Bergschneider developed new works for her duo exhibition with Nanna Riis Andersen at Formation Gallery in Copenhagen. The project explores the relationship between textile and ceramics and how these materials can create a sense of corporeality that extends beyond the human body.
August 2026
In my sculptures, porcelain represents bones, while textile acts as skin. Together, they form skeletal structures that suggest the internal frameworks of living organisms. During the first weeks of the residency, I created hundreds of small ceramic elements, each shaped by hand.
Time and repetition are important parts of my working process. Every element is unique and carries traces of my hands, including fingerprints and small variations in shape and surface.
After firing, the porcelain elements were assembled with hand dyed, semi transparent nylon fabric to create larger sculptural compositions. The fabric connects and holds the ceramic elements together, allowing the individual parts to become part of a larger body. In this process, time becomes physically present in the sculptures through the accumulation of hundreds of individually made elements.
I am particularly interested in the tension between the two materials. Porcelain is hard and seemingly fragile, while the textile is soft, thin and transparent, yet also elastic and surprisingly strong. The fabric can hold hundreds of porcelain elements in place, while the thin ceramic pieces gain strength through their connection to the flexible textile structure. This relationship between strength and fragility, hardness and softness, reflects my interest in the body as a structure that depends on different materials and qualities to form a functioning whole.
