Nowadays, in this industrialized world where you can find almost everything cheap, made from plastic, and easy to obtain, most people are running dangerously far away from the ancestral techniques that use natural materials to create beautiful objects that accomplish more than just their function. Some of these handmade objects that are being so obliged nowadays behold a sensible and aesthetical value which increases its worth and becomes a complete experience for the user. Experience ceramic art in Bogotá!
Sublime objects like this are seen as antique pieces for our houses, or, seen by a new set of eyes, as art pieces that can provide us with visual pleasure and internal warmth. Objects like these are made by artist like Nany Coy Herrera, and this is an insight into her work and her view on this city.
The artist
When you talk with Nany it is difficult not to smile when seeing her enthusiasm for what she does. At our meeting, we were imprinting a tubular ceramic plate – a piece of her current research – on arepa dough (a flatbread dough made out of corn) and seeing the various results after eating the failed ones with hot chocolate, a perfect tradition for a cold Bogota afternoon. The kitchen is a very comfortable workshop for Nany to experiment and play with ingredients, shapes, and materials – it all combines.
Nany Coy Herrera, Bogotá-born artist, wanted to study physics but was instead influenced by one of her teachers and accepted into art school. She has been developing her research project in instrumental ceramics for four years in El Caldero de Plata workshop which is located inside Maleza Proyectos, a collective of current artists that is open to the public.
Riding Bogotá
Even though she will be an artist everywhere she goes, Nany lives in Bogotá and works here. For her, Bogotá is sort of a chaotic city but also serves to connect people in a beautiful territory surrounded by mountains and rich flora; as such, she finds it a beautiful place to live, even though she has lived in several other countries as well. For her, there aren’t sunsets as stunning as in Bogotá, with colors across the spectrum providing a huge spectacle.
She moves throughout the city by bike to enjoy every bit of it and also endure the dangers of it. Everything she sees on her rides and research is used for the production of her pieces: a pattern , a color nuance, a specific shape – everything can be placed in a piece. She is interested in expanding the traditional boundaries of ceramics and drawing to take them to a next level that is both two- and three-dimensional and can be seen in her pieces.
Ceramics as and experience
For her, a ceramicist is a person that, through knowing the material, learns how to provide it with a form.
The workshop El Caldero de Plata is a platform for combining cuisine and art. Nany discovered this fusion due to a personal crisis during which she traveled to Mexico and gave up all artistic pursuits in search of enlightenment regarding her profession. She stopped drawing and playing the guitar. As she was denying her creative impulses, the only place in which she could create was the kitchen, feeding the soul in an aesthetic manner and providing pleasure to the people after finding that a kitchen is a meeting place where food is an open field that does not need explanation. With that in mind, she came back to Colombia focusing on everyday arts, objects used in the kitchen, textures, and colors. Then, she started using ceramics to involve herself in that everyday aesthetic.
At the workshop, everybody is invited. There, people can design and create their own plates and sculpt their own everyday aesthetic. You, the visitor, will be able to achieve a complete experience and relive it every time you use a piece made by Nany, a piece of the city, a piece of the artist, a piece of art made by hand!
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