EKWC / European Ceramic Workcentre, Almystraat 10, Oisterwijk (2026)

26/08/2026

The residency of ... Ina van Zyl (ZA)

A figure wearing a skirt steps over a stool in slow motion, the movement caught in a series of drawings that have been turned into 3D models, moulded, multiplied in relief, in figurines, populating Ina van Zyl’s studio covered in colourful glazes. Several of her line drawings have been rendered into reliefs or stamps, the image never quite the same: sometimes filled in, sometimes just the traces, always graphic. Van Zyl is a painter who, long ago now, started out drawing comics. The scenes she created still feel as fragments from a different world, story lines heavy with suspense, dark humour, sensuality. Some pieces look like her paintings came alive. You must love the polished nails she glazed on an Adam’s Family hand in dark clay. Or the toes that were separated from a foot that now looks like an abstract piece in a high heel shoe. Creepy, hilarious, absolutely original.

Van Zyl began her residency making a series of small slab tiles - stamped with 3D-printed filament stamps made from her drawings (still-life's, portraits, landscapes) and finished with experimental combinations of bright, low temperature glazes. She also coil-built a series of sculptures with EKWC's recycled and manganese-rich black clay - some with sprig-moulded figures applied. In the plaster workshop, she made two-part plaster moulds and slip-cast a series of figurines in stoneware, which were later reduction fired with celadon and tenmoku glazes at high temperature.

website: www.inavanzyl.com

Acknowledgement: Werktuig PPO, Stichting Achterbergh-Domhof

📸: Patty van den Elshout

20/08/2026

TEST CASE ###VIII: SAVE THE DATE
For our regular visitors and all C-curious people: it’s almost time for your periodic dose of exciting ceramics. Come over and see what the residents are up to during EKWC Test Case ###VIII. The studios are open and we’ll show several works that have been made in EKWC in previous months.

Test Case ###VIII is a perfect moment to chat with the current residents, and it’s always a reunion of people who are connected to EKWC or simply love ceramics. So save the date! We look forward to seeing you.

Test Case ###VIII
date: 3 October, 14:00–17:00
location: Almystraat 10, Oisterwijk (NL)
admission: free

Work by Sasha Fishman -
Photo by Sander van Wettum -

18/08/2026

The residency of ... Pedro Matias (PT)

The objects Pedro Matias made have intriguing taxonomic names. Only marine biologists or coral enthusiast can probably visualise the families and genera the titles refer to, but sometimes, knowing Latin helps. Acropora cervicornis, or Staghorn coral, does look like a stag’s antlers. You wouldn’t recognise the coral from the sculpture though; it only remotely resembles the natural organism, which goes for several of the works. It seems that their true affiliation is in the fascinating way these creatures – ceramic and organic – exist. Polyps tentatively reaching out, mouths open to their surroundings; the mind-boggling way corals derive their energy from symbioses with photosynthetic zooxanthellae that inhabit their tissue; their hermaphroditic nature; their vulnerability and their breath-taking beauty. It is in the way the corals build a hospitable world, solid and ephemeral. In all their q***r colourfulness the works also impart a sense of drama, of decay; many corals are endangered species.

Matias hand-built his series of medium-sized sculptures using the coiling technique. He high-bisqued and then low-glazed them using a colourful palette that combined shiny, matter, crater and goop glazes with foamy porcelains. Some areas of the sculptures were left bare for later flocking (the application of small fibre particles to a surface to add colour and texture). With a collaborator, and in advance of the next steps in his project, he worked to test the resonant and conductive properties of the ceramic and his glaze choices. Beside this main body of work, he produced a series of multi-part plaster moulds intended for slip-casting from 3D-printed filament positives and silicon moulds intended for press-moulding. The small sculpture series he made from these functioned also as glaze tests.

www.pedro-matias.com

Funding and support by: WERKTuigPPO & Crowdfunding via Voordekunst

📸: Pedro Matias, Si-Qi Peng & Hsiangfu Chen

14/08/2026

The residency of … Ho Lai (GB)

Sometimes, technical experiments turn out beautifully. Ho Lai created a series of larger and smaller vessels by fusing stones together with a luscious glaze. It turns the pieces into sculptures of weathered concrete or rock, with moss-like patches where slate stone did something unexpected. The vessels are obviously man-made, but it’s as if nature joined in as co-creator. The result is amazing, but beauty is not all there is to it; Lai’s inventive production process also speaks of the world in which we live. During firing, the separate stones held together by the glaze would never have stayed in place without support. There’s moulding involved and counter-moulding to prevent the vessels from collapsing. Don’t ideologies and traditions work like this? Shaping people’s lives, making the existing order seem natural – inevitable even. Somehow, the vessels act as a reminder that society might be organised differently, without the world necessarily falling apart.

To produce her vessels, Lai had to begin by hand-building several krater and moon-jar-like ceramic saggars to support the works during firing. These high-bisqued saggars were packed with a layer of sand and wallpaper glue, then a layer of crushed granite (dust and rocks) coated with a sodium feldspar and bentonite (to encourage fusion), before finally being filled to the brim with sand. They were fired slowly - and cooled very slowly too. Once cooled, Lai had to empty, wash, sand and scrap the works to finish them.

www.ho-lai.com

11/08/2026

The residency of … Jeroen de Leijer (NL)

Jeroen de Leijer, best known for his cartoons and illustrations, made a host of ceramic creatures and other objects that look as if he’s been doing this all his life. But no, never worked with clay before. “When I’m drawing, the pencil is an extension of my hand and my mind, I hadn’t expected for something similar to happen with clay. The material is more resistant, you need patience and sometimes things break. In general, however, it came quite natural.” De Leijer wanted to reproduce in ceramics a set of bright-coloured prints he made, loosely based on Ovidius Metamorphoses. The first thing you notice: the resulting sculptures are unusually animated, alive, from the fishy sea monsters and the wounded Chinese lion to the hilarious angry turkey and the skull-hearted sunflowers. Their eyes follow you around as you start to recognise recurring themes and running gags among the absurdist transformations.

De Leijer primarily used EKWC’s roughest white clay body, WB 1975, and worked with hand-building techniques - hand-modelling, coiling, and slab-making - during his residency. He sometimes pigmented his clay but often added bright colour with underglazes and low-temperature shiny glazes. With the Materials, Moulds and Machines lab, he 3D-printed a bitmap-roller, a reference the bitmap texture of his silkscreen prints. He also produced a plaster press-mould from a pylon (cone) as a basic form for some of his sculptures and worked with a mould of a human face, altering the press-moulded positives as he worked.

www.jeroendeleijer.nl

Acknowledgement: Van Achterbergh-Domhof

07/08/2026

OPEN CALL 2027/2028 final call for applications

Unrivalled facilities, a dedicated team of technical advisers, and thirteen weeks to completely focus on an ambitious project or research programme in ceramics: that is EKWC Classic.

You have eight more days left to apply for a residency starting in the period from November 2027 to September 2028.

We’re really looking forward to receiving original proposals that are artistically and technically challenging – both for you and for us. We will select a maximum of 45 proposals.

Visit our website (link in bio) for information about the application procedure, conditions and costs, and to apply of course.

The deadline is 15 August, 2026, 23.59 CEST. HOWEVER…

During the previous open call, our site was overwhelmed with applications in the final few minutes before the deadline, resulting in failed uploads and frantic mails and messages. To avoid a similar stressful situation, we kindly ask you not to wait until the very last moment to send in your application.

04/08/2026

The residency of … Natnapat Kullananant (TH)

Natnapat Kullananant wanted to work with recycled glass to make glass-stained windows, but he couldn’t get going. Too many options, too many choices… Eventually, he created a series of tests consisting of flat, open frames of black clay, in which patches of glass from crushed bottles have been melted in place. Sometimes, the splinters have barely fused, sometimes they form a blob, or they’ve leaked right through a hole. Tests from the gradient kiln resulted in a few glass bars with different colours, different levels of opacity. And just as Kullananant admits that it’s all a bit immature, the light hits a set of works and the green fragments of fractured glass become vibrant leaves growing through black posts and windows. The fragments reveal their poetic potential, evoking abandoned structures or silent ruins; perhaps not silent, but peaceful? What a strange, paradoxical attainment, to let humans imagine their own absence.

Kullananant collected glass bottles from EKWC’s recycling and smashed, cut or milled them to different sizes and grinds. He worked primarily with EKWC’s (fine or coarse) manganese-rich black clay but also, at times, with the fine, white stoneware. His organically shaped clay frames were high-bisqued, followed by a low-temperature (approximately 900 degree Celsius) glass-fusion second firing within a bed of sand or coarse molochite.

www.natnapatk.com

31/07/2026

The residency of … Si-Qi Peng (TW)

Sometimes, residents execute only part of a work in ceramics, making it hard to appreciate the results of their residency. Si-Qi Peng created long ceramic handles that look like crutches. They only make sense when you see them attached to the cassette player on wheels she developed with her boyfriend. Driven by the rotation of the wheels, the player produces garbled sounds – unless you find the correct speed to recognise a melancholy song. Meanwhile, a microphone picks up ambient sound which is reinforced, gradually drawing out the music. The fragility of the ceramic handles adds to a feeling of time passing and fading memories. Similar connotations are involved in Peng’s series of hand fans. When fans became obsolete, many were used to adorn the paper screens that divided interior spaces. These screens too have lost their function, but as decorative pieces they retain the mystique of things hidden from view.

Peng’s series of wall-hanging fans were cut from slabs of black, white and marbled clay. To them, she applied many different glazes - ranging from low-temperature crackle and crater glazes to copper saturation; to celadons and tenmokus in reduction firings. Her crutch handles were cast in stoneware from neat three-part plaster moulds and, likewise, received a range of surface and atmospheric treatments - including iris, green and orange lustres in low-temperature third firings. Peng’s crutch legs were made from extruded lengths of black and white clay. She also press-moulded and slip-cast a series of plates and (dust pan) trays in stoneware and porcelain. Into these, she experimented with melting broken glass bottles in the kiln to produce thick, glassy pools of glaze and completed the work by combining them with thinly cast porcelain leave.

28/07/2026

The residency of … Gam Bodenhausen (NL)

Scale is a matter of the imagination. The cliffs that inspire Gam Bodenhausen’s monumental drawings would dwarf the wall-covering works to the size of a snowflake. But when she translates those same drawings into substantially smaller ceramic pieces, the imposing cliffs with their vertiginous walls reappear. Except now, they have been reduced to a sliver of rock, pliable like paper, waving in a watery fashion, a staggeringly precarious constellation that, paradoxically, allows the work to stand upright unaided. In a second series of work, Bodenhausen shaped mounds with a vertical slice missing in the middle – as if she aimed a galactic laser beam at a mountain to carve a cleft straight through it to reduce travelling time. More abstractly: the artist explored relations of planes to volumes and, inadvertently, of humans to the world. At the same time, the works with their poetic, sensitive surfaces are simply beautiful objects.

Bodenhausen’s residency started with graphite - her primary drawing material - and unfurled from there. Her wavering cliff-like sculptural forms were coil built from EKWC coarsest white clay body, WB 1795. Her sliced stone series were also coil-built - but made using the fine white clay, a choice that suited their size but also the amount of surface detail applied to them. Bodenhausen worked with carving, scratching, stamping and 3D-clay printing techniques to emulate various stone textures and applied a range of oxide washes and matte and/or rough engobes and glazes to her works. Moving from the simplicity of graphite to the, at times, dizzying aesthetic possibilities of glaze was a challenge Bodenhausen tackled though a combination of research/testing and gut-feeling/self-trust.

Website: www.gambodenhausen.nl

Acknowledgement: Stichting van Achterbergh-Domhof

photo credit:

24/07/2026

The residency of ... Sun Forest (CA)

Canada is often perceived as a progressive country, but first-generation Korean Canadian Sun Forest sees reasons to nuance its friendly image. In response to the country’s ongoing anti-immigration and refugee bill C-2, for instance, she created riot bricks engraved with the bill’s text and a call for cultural resilience. In a set of ceramic postcards and a series of porcelain lithophanes (images moulded in sheets of translucent material), the artist shows how open-pit mining ravages Canada’s nature to the benefit of industry, including arms production. Turning south, Sun focused on school shootings in the US with strings of ceramic cartridges: one round for each person killed. She also made experimental works that address questions of culture and identity related – perhaps inevitably – to migration. The antique Korean vase Sun modelled and reproduced in an iterative process of moulding and casting evokes a venerable tradition, together with a melancholy sense of distance.

Sun began her residency press-moulding porcelain into silicon moulds she made by casting every leaf of a cabbage head. After bisquing, she applied celadon glaze and reduction fired the delicate pieces. She hand-turned a series of vessels in plaster which then served as positives in the process of making two-part moulds for press-moulding. She press-moulded red clay bricks from a series of plaster and wooden moulds and worked with 3D printed stamps to add text elements to them. Sun slip-trailed bone china to produce fine lettering; slip-cast a series of porcelain bullet shells and postcards — to which she applied decals in a third, low-firing. Sun then translated a series of 2D images into 3D images which were milled in low relief to produce a series of lithophane moulds — into which she cast porcelain and fired at high temperatures. Moreover, Sun slip-cast a series of placenta jars in bone china, and applied a shiny transparent and then iris lustre on top — and produced stoneware slabs which she cut back to resemble traditional Korean window design.

Acknowledgement: Canada Council for the Arts; SFU's TARA Awards
📸: Rene van der Hulst

EKWC / European Ceramic Workcentre

26/08/2026

20/08/2026

18/08/2026

14/08/2026

11/08/2026

07/08/2026

04/08/2026

31/07/2026

28/07/2026

24/07/2026

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