In Timea Tihanyi’s ceramic sculptures heavily textured undulating surfaces billow, gather, and fold like
linen. Her medium, porcelain, resembles starched fabrics of a long-gone past, stubbornly holding their
shape, while beginning to succumb to unseen forces.
For Tihanyi, the craft heritage of handmaking is as important as the digital technology she builds her
sculptures with. She references domestic textiles from Hungary: puffy down beddings (“dunyha”) and
wedding dowries of crisp linens (“kelengye”) decorated with traditional cross-stitch embroidery patterns
from Central and Eastern Europe. Her work is grown out of a maternal lineage of blue-collar labor in
textile mills and lace factories, mending and sewing for hire. Tihanyi’s domain is the social, considering
personal and community histories, economic and political contexts, and the natural language of
materials she uses and references.
An early innovator with ceramic 3d printing, Tihanyi carefully examines the binary world of technology
and puts the digital in dialogue with the clay material. Her research combines basic geometric motifs
from Hungarian embroidery. Building the work meticulously and patiently, she layers original design
elements digitally in a CAD program until a more complex and entirely novel image emerges. The stiches
in the cloth are translated as textures—made up by small bumps and loops in porcelain—extruded by
the 3D printer. Tihanyi’s work references the pottery tradition of the vessel. Embracing a hollow volume,
its walls are being shaped by forces both from the inside and the outside. Similarly, Tihanyi’s sculptures
are reshaped after the printing with gentle pressure, weight, and gravity in repeated firings. The
resulting forms are always a surprise. In these, the precision of the digital code meets accidental
slippages of clay, balancing of intention with serendipity, precariousness with strength, and
mathematical logic with beauty.
Tender was supported by a 2022 CityArtist grant from Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
Opening reception: July 6th
Meet the artist: August 3rd
Exhibition runs July 6 - August 5, 2023