Francisca

Francisca Martins is a designer and aspiring artist, with a degree in Product Design Ceramics and Glass (ESAD . Caldas da Rainha) and is currently taking a Masters in Arts and Sciences of Glass and Ceramics (Vicarte - partnership between Lisbon Fine Arts and FCT Nova, Monte da Caparica). Francisca' work is mostly with ceramic material, approaching the various techniques that this material allows to develop and offers. Keeping her main focus on sculpture, she develops her practice through deformed forms and explores them till exhaustion, giving atention to some details, for example facial parts or body elements. Of equal way, she is interested in understanding the boundaries between handicraft and art and to what ceramics can be molded and transformed into "living" forms. Her main research, in this intimacy with ceramics, to discover more challenging paths that imply getting out of the comfort zone, not only materialistic, but also emotionally, having topics such as matter in relation to history, void, lack of air, morphology, movement, the act of falling and diminishing, distortion, layers or skin, some of them already reflected into her pieces.

Q&A

Artist Statement

Francisca Martins is a designer and aspiring artist, with a degree in Product Design Ceramics and Glass (ESAD . Caldas da Rainha) and is currently taking a Masters in Arts and Sciences of Glass and Ceramics (Vicarte – partnership between Lisbon Fine Arts and FCT Nova, Monte da Caparica). Francisca’ work is mostly with ceramic material, approaching the various techniques that this material allows to develop and offers. Keeping her main focus on sculpture, she develops her practice through deformed forms and explores them till exhaustion, giving atention to some details, for example facial parts or body elements. Of equal way, she is interested in understanding the boundaries between handicraft and art and to what ceramics can be molded and transformed into “living” forms. Her main research, in this intimacy with ceramics, to discover more challenging paths that imply getting out of the comfort zone, not only materialistic, but also emotionally, having topics such as matter in relation to history, void, lack of air, morphology, movement, the act of falling and diminishing, distortion, layers or skin, some of them already reflected into her pieces.

What craft do you work with?

My first contact with ceramics was when I was about 7 or 8 years, at the ATL I went when I was a child (mostly hand building and tiles with and at a dance festival called Andanças (where I had my first contact with a potter’s wheel). In a more serious point of view, I’ve been working with ceramics for about five years now. My favourite technique are hand building and coils!

What inspires you to work with this craft?

The freedom to create shapes, the texture of the material, the process of being able to build and deconstruct and remake, depending on the constant change of ways the piece transmit while we are creating it. And the comfort that comes with working with your hands on something that is as much ours as the earth.

How do you start your creative process?

My creative process is still developing, but it started, in a more serious aproach about two years now. I find myself doing an opposite process of what normally is done, which is, I normally start first the piece itself (the 3D piece), and only after I explore it in a bidimentional way, and see what other forms and ideas this process can bring me. The most enjoyable part for me is the making, when I have my hands on the material and a piece is being created. The more difficult part for me as been the relation with the emotional part from where the pieces are created from. I tend to rely on the techniques and what they bring me, because it is the easy part to interpret and put asside the emotional or not explain it.

How would you best describe your workspace and what tools could you not do without?

I would best describe my work place like a multifunctional place, with a varied dynamic, of people and types of craft. But for now, my work place as been my house and the spaces I can use at school. The tools I can’t see myself without are of couse my Hands, the best tool a ceramist can have, and my little box with all my tools that help with details or removal of extra material.

Are there new techniques you would like to try?

Yes, always, the ones I would love to try would be the ones where the firing process is more traditional, where normally wood kilns are used.

What have you learnt or the best advice you have received that you would like to share with fellow crafters?

That ceramics is one of the materials where all humans, from children to adults should try to play with, at least once in their life time. Glass and wood are two of the craft types I would enjoy having a collab with. BEing able to bring this joyfull feeling I feel when working with ceramics to more curious people, teaching them a bit of what I know.