Swawole x Gabi Strama
Two pottery artists join their forces
The GIRLS series, 2022, is a limited edition created during a cooperation of the duo Gabi Strama & Paulina Puciłowska / Swawole.
Material: slip cast and / or hand built ceramics, black engobe, transparent glaze, genuine gold (signatures)
Technique:
Ceramics are cast in plaster molds (the plates are formed by hand), and further processed by hand, finally painted with engobes and decorated with the sgraffito method. The surface of some of them was scraped with a chisel. Glazed with transparent glaze, finally signed with gold.
Bold forms and graphics
After a short brainstorm, Paulina and Gabi decided to implement their characteristic ways of expression into joint works. This way they created a series of extraordinary shapes build up by Paulina using her original tableware as modules and covered them with Gabi’s dare graphics.
Paulina complex works are build up by joining single modules of her meticulously prepared basic shapes - mugs, bowls, vases. She has perfected her workshop for years and keeps on exploring the capabilities of the slip casting technique.
Gabi has rediscovered the renaissance way of decorating facades, originating from Italy. Sgraffito facades were created by covering a wall with multiple layers of plaster in various colors and subsequently scraping off parts of it, thus recovering the next layers. Gabi is reinterpreting that principle in her ceramics.
Girls on display
The ‘Girls’ collection originally consists of 7 large vases and numerous other objects such as smaller vases, cups and plates. The original pieces are on display at the Flow Art House Gallery in Warsaw since August 2022.
Other objects are available at Swawole Atelier in Hamburg. The sandwich plates with girls and plates are serving for the winter season 2022/2023 at Klinker Bar in Hamburg.
If you’d like to make Girls visit your gallery or have an idea of putting them to use, feel free to contact us!
Paula @paulap.crafts
I express my sturdy and sensitive soul in a vast spectrum of creative fields. My biggest passion, however, is pottery, and here I bring it to your hands.
My adventure with clay has started like many others’:
I've been looking for a hobby that would bring me relief from everyday pressure. I am always amazed how handcrafting completely cleared my mind.
The artworks I create are a merger of temporary design and traditional handcraft. My design process relies on a correlation between the analog and the digital world.
I love to work with sketches, which are followed by lots of manual and rapid prototypes. While creating, I often engage the skills I acquired in kindred fields of Architecture and Design. By blending the traditional craftsmanship and modern technologies, I eager to bring a new meaning to Pottery.
Gabi @gabistrama
Although I do not have an artistic education, I have always explored various forms of expression and learned it on my own terms.
Professionally I work as art director on promotion and democratization of art. My last project focused on female artists, a particularly important topic for me. During the pandemic, I decided to put everything aside and take care of my own artistic/ceramic project - The Girls.
It is the sum of my passions and interests both in ceramics, which I have been dealing with for over 3 years, and the subject of presence of women in art.
For decorating my ceramics, I use sgraffito, an ancient decorative technique used in architecture, which consists of applying several layers of differently colored plaster to the wall and scraping the surface layers according to the pattern.