Since the early 2000s, ceramics have been one of the central media in Mai-Thu Perret’s work. What is particularly interesting is how visibly the physical labor involved in working with the material remains. Clay is a material that responds to touch, to pressure, to kneading, to destruction, and to reshaping. Its plasticity gives rise to expressive forms in which the process, the hand, chance, and the materiality itself play an important role.
The same applies to her watercolors. Here, too, Perret works with a medium that can never be fully controlled. Watercolor always brings unpredictability: gradients, concentrations, transparencies, small accidents. It is precisely this openness that is productive for her. Watercolor allows for a lightness and permeability in which control and chance, decision and serendipity come together. And in this way of working lies grea freedom:
the material itself provides room for maneuver. The glazes, surfaces, and deformations reveal that design is also a dialogue with resistance, chance, and the material’s own life.