Anne Marie Laureys

Born in 1962 in Beveren, Belgium 

Lives and works in Russeignies, Belgium

Anne Marie Laureys’ life-long love for clay began during her studies at the Luca School of Art in Ghent, Belgium. Since her first experience working with the material, she has not gone a day without it and considers throwing on a wheel to be her personal language of communication with the medium.

The current iteration of her critically acclaimed work arose from the desire to maintain the clay’s tactility and the exciting potential of the medium, in tandem with satisfying a need to test its limitations. The tension that holds her sculptures together comes from the dissapearing between interior and exterior. The cloud-like solids approach the vessel not only as a frame or container for void, but as void itself— thought this is not to say that these pieces are empty, for Laureys conceives of her vessels as “metaphors for feelings.” The deconstruction and dissapearance of the lip, traditionaly the vessel’s barrier between interior and exterior, is one of Laureys’ trademark boundary-pushing methods. Another is the spacious, warped forms that emerge after Laureys throws on her wheel and sculpts with her fingers. In her words, he work “hides the inside while framing the outside.”

Her work has been exhibited at the Icheon Biennale in South Korea, in Taiwan (Yingge), Japan (Mino), China (Changhai), and more recently in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and at Florida’s Boca Raton Museum of Art for the exhibition Regarding George Ohr: Contemporary Ceramics in the Spirit of the Mad Potter (2017-18).