Introducing Victorian ceramicist Cassie Hansen...
Never before have the interiors of our homes been so important, from lockdowns to WFH, we are repeatably given pause to re-examine our spaces and their contents. Our senses are heightened by light and shade, warmth and textures, small gestures such as fresh flowers or a thoughtful artwork can elevate our mood beyond the day to day of lockdowns and social distancing. A small sculpture can expand our imagination to recall trips to Dehli or Japan. To revisit structures conjured to express grand gestures or simply, security and serenity.
In such ways, the ceramic works of Cassie Hansen use a spatial capacity to expand and contract our way of seeing. In her current work she explores form as a series of additions and subtractions. Layered textures that reminisce of architecture monoliths and brutalist forms of bygone eras, condensed into simple forms, domestic in scale but instilled with the abstract memory of larger, grander visions.
Image Nikita Hederics.
Hansen is the long time editor of architecture magazine Artichoke and has accumulated the layered nuance of 8 years of writing, thinking and looking at architecture and design. It has filtered into her ceramic practice, once a tactile reprieve from sitting behind a desk all day, now a new direction in her country home studio, teaching and making ceramics a couple of days per week.
Image Cassie Hansen.
She began ceramics in 2016 and in 2018 spent a year learning from renowned ceramicists Neville French and Kate Jones at Shane Kent’s Melbourne-based ceramics school, the School of Clay and Art (SOCA). Her work suggests architecture, but with finer distinctions, referencing too, shadow and the play of light on surfaces. Tactile, understated, they offer a way to reconsider our space and the objects that fill them, via small gestures of discreet beauty.
Cassie Hansen's Studio shelves with tests, samples and experiments.
Smoke Signals, 2021 Cassie Hansen.
