Mia Llauder i Vinals




Dancing shadows of weaved porcelain structures, ethereal and untouchable. A rare specimen of ceramic sculpture.
Mia Llauder is a potter of a bright imagination. Her work is primarily focused on creating a wide range of unique small pieces of porcelain: an alphabet of her own. Like a bead meditation, she works meticulously with these small abstract shapes, one after the other as if there would be nothing else: the tiny coil, the spiral, the round oval, a stick, a circle…. As if in her mind there would only be that particular bit of porcelain, white or sometimes black, with a touch of black stoneware, red or gold luster on the tips. Single-fired. And repeating that over and over, with the same care.
But that small piece is just a seed, which will become part of a large structure, a true ceramic sculpture. An alphabet that creates a powerful language to express the most subtle concepts, just by sewing, joining, attaching with string, clothing, plastic and fibers with a logic but playful look.
Her family had a household linen company, so she grew up among colorful thread and ribbons reels, buttons of hundreds of shapes, crochet work… toys she grew to transform in a unique cosmology, and translated it in an artistic approach.
Llaudé’s ceramic work is light and flexible, rare characteristics in the ceramic field. She works against the rigidity of the material, and searches its movement instead. The artist changes the cold, hard, inert, dens nature of porcelain and transforms it in its opposite. Thus, each of these seeds can be part of the most diverse structures, creations and meanings. She is after the maximum expression using the most basic forms, and the minimum elaboration, creating the magic with the simple and banal. A minimalist essence for a maximum expression.
In her studio reigns cleanliness, tidiness, with lots of little drawers, like jewellery boxes, that contain her small pieces in order, so she can construct a new tale anytime. Ephemeral art that depends on the space around. A pristine mind, gridded artistic approach, which works together with intuition to build spiderweb-like ceramic pieces.
Her new creations are more and more subtle and sophisticated. A world of logic, of rational, modular structures, as a neural nets, like small societies that works in perfect balance. The strongest message these pieces suggest is that life is not about things, but about the link between things, about the space around and between the modules, whether people, objects, places…
Mia Llauder takes in account not only the pieces, but the void they create, the shadow, the negative, the reflection in the space and spirit. It’s not so much about the material aspect, but about suggestion. Each piece is created conceiving the space, the volume the piece will take up. And building on that void, the structure emerges, just like a spider works.
Is as if Llauder would have created a structuralism artistic branch, which didn’t really take place at its time, but a discipline Levy-Strauss would for sure have approved: the abstract structures are deeply telling of what’s behind human relations, cultural structures, languages, societies, musical structures. The element loses its importance: the structure, the relations is what matters. It awakes a spirit of an essence, the skeleton of things.

A clear example of this, a bit more explicit from her side, is the collection of “Portraits”, recently exhibited, where she represents her own personal look about relationships with people around her: friends, family, colleagues… they are there, but each one of them is also the archetype, the representation of roles and relationships. Each sculpture has a name, it refers to somebody, but also the peculiar role it has created with the artist.
Nevertheless, as she herself explains, Mia Llauder works guided by intuition, and any explanation of meaning it appears only later, when the work is already there, when creation has already taken place. Her goal is mostly aesthetical, contemplative, not narrative or vindictive. What she means to say is just there, in front of your very eyes. Is the language she has chosen to touch you, to tell you, to move you. And it’s the viewer task to take conclusions.
Caterina Roma.