Ceramic picture - Pictures from a life of a woman

The composition consists of 20 oblong porcelain plates, in a matrix of 5 × 4. Some of them bear images, transferred with a photographic process and then fired on the plates in black-and-white and iron-red tones: portraits of infants and children, and a mother and her one- or two-year-old son, looking into the camera. The rest of the plates show impressions made by crumpled children’s clothing pressed into the unfired porcelain mass. Twenty selected or randomly chosen pictures from the life of a woman, an artist, ceramist Ildikó Polgár, framed and arranged, as if in a photo album.

Ildikó Polgár’s multifarious and rich oeuvre boasts many unique achievements. Such is the photo-ceramic (photo-porcelain) technique she invented and perfected, and used in some of the plates of Pictures from the Life of a Woman. She has often used family or private photographs in her works, which gives them a very direct, personal and intimate feel.

The ceramicist’s chief interests include the themes of femininity and motherhood, the genre of the still life, and the events of the 1956 Hungarian War of Independence. Along with photos transferred and fired on the ceramic, idols or totems that stylize women’s bodies were among the means of exploring the female themes; she made the first of these, which she called torsos and tubes at the time, at the Ceramics in the Garden I and II symposia of the Siklós Ceramics Artist Colony in 1976 and 1977 (cf. IM inv. no. 80.146.1 and 80.147.1). (You can find the catalogue of the Ceramics in the Garden I and II symposia here.)