Timea Tihanyi

Tender

July 6 - 29, 2023

Opening Reception: “First Thursday,” July 6, 6-8pm

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. An early innovator with ceramic 3D printing, the artist carefully examines the binary world of technology and puts the digital in dialogue with the clay material. 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. Tihanyi’s explores personal and community histories, economic and political contexts, and the natural language of materials she uses and references.

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 stitches 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. The precision of the digital code meets accidental slippages of clay, balancing intention with serendipity, precariousness with strength, and mathematical logic with beauty.

Work in exhibition