meet this artist turning trash into weird vases

Hi Yvonne! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your ceramics practice? I am a tiny Colombian that came to Austria to follow my dreams as an artist. At first I didn’t know what that would look like or what medium that would be until I found ceramics. What fuels me most is experimenting, trying new things and learning. This satisfies my nerdy self and my creative self! Apart from experimenting with clay and glaze materials, I love to play with shapes and doing something I like to call ‘3D collage’, which is cutting and pasting 3D shapes to create new things.

How would you describe your style to someone who’s never seen your work? Pieces that want to be geometrical but are totally wonky. My shapes are unique but work well with very rough and raw clay, as well as very fine porcelain.
What first drew you to working with clay? I didn’t want to love clay when I first got introduced to it at uni. I thought it was another material we had to learn – just like wood or metal. I was like a little kid who loves something and can’t admit it! My teacher saw my talent during class and offered me a job right there and then to work in his manufacturing company. During the job I was asking so many nerdy questions and researching chemistry and geology in my free time that I knew it was time to stop denying that this was the path for me. 

How did the 'trash edition' series come about? I moved into a very small studio by myself at the start of my solo career and I didn’t have a working sink. For clay, you need water for pretty much everything and you can’t use a normal sink as it will clog with clay particles pretty fast. I engineered a water filtering system to be able to separate the sedimentary clay with the water. At first my plan was to dispose of this sink waste safely and re-use the water to clean tools or wet sand my pieces. After some time I grew tired of disposing this sedimentary clay and thought to myself: ‘what happens if I fire it?’ After a few tests I realised I can use this sink waste with a combination of clay to make it more sturdy. And because I was already using waste I decided to add clay trimmings into the mix and create marbled, unpredictable pieces. What’s the process for turning clay scraps into something new? I mentioned my water filtering system. I use it to dump all the water that I use to clean tools, buckets and clay pieces etc. After a few months of use, the top part of the sink starts getting moldy and there is too much clay and glaze particles to filter new water coming in. I put that sink waste into plaster molds for a week so that the sink waste gets a plastic consistency and I can start playing with it. I take some clay trimmings from some other projects and I wedge it into the sink waste. From that I can create almost anything but I like to use it for ash trays and weird vases. Everytime I do this process, the sink waste will have a different texture and a different color. It always depends on what I was working on the months before. This is my favorite part – it is always a surprise. What I love about it is that textbook-wise it should not work because I’m combining clay particles, glaze particles and small grog (fired ceramic). But it does! And the texture is always so different that you have to think twice if it really is ceramics.

What is your favourite item from the trash edition? Hard to say! But it would probably be between the ashtray and the cylinder. The ashtray because of its shape and the beautiful grey and orange combination. The cylinder because it looks like a tree trunk and it is so rough and doesn’t look like ceramics at all!ΩWhat do you enjoy about working with 'waste' materials? I can never replicate it and it is always a great surprise what comes out of it! I love that I don’t have to dispose of it anymore and can find a new home instead of landing somewhere in a landfill. I am also really proud to say that I re-use every single drop of material that comes into my studio, including water! 



Where do you find inspiration for your ceramics? Everywhere and anywhere! I like to find inspiration from other mediums mostly (such as stone, glass, paintings and architecture) and I concentrate on shapes more than material or functionality. It is fun to train the eye to see things differently. So one day I might be walking down the street and see a metal fence on a window and it has a beautiful silhouette that sparks inspiration in using that shape in a handle or in a vase body.

Do you have any rituals or techniques you use to boost your creativity? I play a lot in the studio and give myself challenges to keep the inspiration and creativity flowing, such as allowing myself to use only two shapes and see how many different vases I can create by cutting and pasting. Sometimes limiting myself in some ways gives my brain fun exercise and, with time, makes me more creative. It keeps it fun! 
What’s next for you? I’m currently saying ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes. I am very into wild clay at the moment, experimenting and testing to get beautiful raw colors and textures into my works. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to get opportunities in the area of experimentation so that I’m always challenged while working with clay and learning new things.

See more of Yvonne’s trash collection on her website or follow her on Instagram at @_yvonnerausch