In the exhibition In the Depths of Blue there is Yellow, Kristoffer Zeiner brings together the work of Kim Wawer and Philip Coyne. In preparation for the exhibition, both artists read Gaston Bachelard’s essay Reveries of Material Interiority, in which he argues that objects possess inner worlds — endless repositories of ideas, associations, and connections, accessible through reverie and reflection.
Kim Wawer’s ceramic work is closely connected to the body. Her organic sculptures are often shaped to her own measurements, making them wearable or experienced as extensions of the human form. Perforated and branched, these forms function as vessels: carriers of inner worlds that also exist as autonomous material objects. Their tactile openings and organic shapes invite exploration of the relationship between body, object, and space.
Philip Coyne works with sculpture, drawings, 2D objects, and text. His practice examines how historical and social structures separate us from one another and from the world around us, and how creative forces operate within these structures. Large 2D works combine figuration, urban landscapes, historical references, and literature, while smaller sculptures and drawings focus on the artwork itself as a container of social and material forces. For this exhibition, Coyne reproduced human figures from the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). By removing these figures from their original context, he alters their function, while still evoking the inner richness of the landscapes they once inhabited.
Kim Wawer's process based practice draws from a complex circulatory sense of belonging in relationship to her own body and the landscape she is positioned in. Borderless perforated ceramic shapes are molded to the dimensions of her body: to be held, carried, and cared for as extensions of her own self, simultaneously weighing down and accompanying her.
Her specific sculptural vocabulary is evocative of porous surfaces that both separate and connect body and landscape, intimately questioning the relationship between the interior and exterior processes which generate an identity.
In Wawer’s work notions of scale, empathy and shapelessness are directly connected to her personal history of diasporic belonging in an embodied relationship to the materials she shapes, bringing together the intimate through material vocabularies that speak with universal meaning, putting forward fertile spaces for contamination.
Kim Wawer (Amsterdam, 1988) has a Bachelor of Fine Art in the field of Ceramics and Master of Interior Architecture degree from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Her works has been presented in solo and group exhibition’s at amongst others; Galleri Hulias (Oslo), Fondazione Officine Saffi (Milano), Bologna.cc(Amsterdam), de Fabriek (Eindhoven), Oude Kerk (Amstedam) and Keramiekmuseum Princessenhof (Leeuwarden). In 2024 she was nominated for the Officine Saffi Award in Milano together with 5 other Dutch ceramicist artists.
Philip Coyne (b. UK, 1989) is an artist, writer and educator living and working in the Netherlands, whose work enacts a poetics of social life: this is to say that he thinks about, writes about and attempts to produce work though the forms of production endemic to both our social lives and social, or relational, life in general. Using sculpture, text, drawing and painting, he makes work about the historic processes of enclosure and individuation that separate us from each other and the world around us.
Within his practice, large 2d works that make use of scale and densely figurative compositions, are interspersed with smaller often more abstract sculptures and drawings. These larger works weave together depictions of urban wasteland; allegories from premodern literature or moments of social unrest; and the history of local non-monumental public art to think about the forms of creativity that manage to slip through the cracks of enclosure or regulation. More broadly these works focus on questions of social embedding, circulation, visibility, and how to dislodge the individual as the assumed addressee of contemporary art. In turn, the smaller works take a very different approach to a similar set of question by focusing more explicitly on the artwork as a contained receptacle of social forces. Whether this is within their own material or affective ecologies; their ontological status as artworks; or in relation to the process of extraction enacted in their production.
While Coyne’s work is built upon a dense research and theoretical practice, which is exercised most straight forwardly in his writing, the artworks do not draw from the visual traditions of conceptual art, nor do they attempt to simply explicate the research base. Rather, they incorporate this base at the level of subject matter and methodology, and attempt to build up an aesthetic vocabulary of conviviality. Using eros, generosity and a very serious cuteness as visual strategies, his works echo the affective vocabularies, or structures of feeling, that particular subcultures produce.
Coyne graduated from Leeds Beckett in 2012, The School of the Damned in 2014, and from the Fine Art MA at the Sandberg Instituut in 2018, where he subsequently taught for 6 years. Recent written work has focused on Sylvia Wynter and her notion of Man; outline a non-Liberal notion of time/space; the different socialities of burial mounds and Land Art; and an erotics of friendship
