Júlia Néma (1973, Budapest) is a Ferenczy Noémi Award-winning porcelain and ceramic artist, a defining figure of the Hungarian and international ceramic art scene. Her artistic creed was shaped by significant Eastern and Western experiences: Far Eastern aesthetics, European design and Hungarian ceramic art
traditions prevail simultaneously in her artistic practice, which was historically shaped by minimal art, constructivism and conceptualism. Her masters include painter and sculptor János Fajó and ceramic artist and kiln designer, Frederick L. Olsen.
Néma, also awarded with the Hungarian Design Award, always widens the boundaries of the thousands of years of traditional ceramic art, and seeks new ways in its aesthetics and technical possibilities. Her work pushes the boundaries of ceramic art: as a result of long research and experimental processes, she
reveals the raw materials and physical components of her works and transform them into her personal artistic media. Materials and their mutual influence play a central role in her oeuvre. She believes that materials drawn from nature have radiance, presence, and spirituality, in connection with the historicity of the environment from which they originate. This exploratory and innovative, as well as contemplative and conceptual attitude is presented in her solo exhibition entitled Immersion. It sheds new light not only on her primary material, earth, but also on our understanding of paper, which has been thematized in her art from the beginning.
The groups of works on display, from stelae and tabulae to earth papers and handmade clay-paper collages, use earth solutions in various forms and processes. The stelae and tabulae are clay objects finished in the artist’s wood-fired kiln as results of several years of research presented earlier under the overall heading “Liquid earth”. Using soil samples she extracted from the volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Balaton Uplands, Néma created unique porcelain and clay objects, on which the glazes were deposited in a picturesque manner.
She also uses these natural pigment materials as paint for her “soil images” and, most recently, cooperating with Petra Füzes at Orfű Mills, she has combined the collected samples with the substance of paper. Clays and minerals, mixed into hand crafted paper, have resulted in special visual effects, textures and patterns. The outcome of this process, ranging from dynamic and macrocosmic streams
to monochromatic, elementary and unostentatious surfaces, is always singular and unrepeatable. These lyrical compositions, through overlapping, masking and supplementing various sheets of claypaper invented by the artist as her own idiosyncratic medium, offer glimpses into the poetic alchemy of Júlia Néma.
Zita SÁRVÁRI
