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Myrto Zirini | Episode 566
Myrrto Zirini studied interior design and architecture in London where she also worked for 3 years as a consultant at Space Syntax Ltd. In 2004 Myrto returned to her home city, Athens Greece, and worked within architecture and design in multiple areas – urban/public spaces, architecture and interior design (as a partner at aka lab architects) down to the smaller scales of exhibitions, furniture and graphic design. Myrto has also taught at the MA interior design course at Vakalo Art & Design College in Athens. She moved to the island of Corfu in 2012. Myrto went on a six month period learning ceramics with a local potter in Corfu in 2014 and continued learning on her own by experimenting with clay. In 2015 Myrto started her own small studio and production. In 2017 Myrto created a combined studio and showroom in the old town of Corfu, focusing on one of a kind sculptural, organic forms.
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What is a cultural fossil? What does that mean?
Well, growing up in Greece, as a person who has parents who are always interested in antiquities. My mother has been a tourist guide all her life. I have been exposed to so many ceramics in my life, with so much information. When I started working with clay I felt that there is such an amazing tool for transmitting information in a very, very long time frame. With Ancient Greek artifacts most of the information comes from ceramics. With the writings and everything it was the easiest way for them to write. They didn’t really have paper at the time. Carving something on marble can take a few hours, just to write a word, so writing on ceramics was the easiest and the most preserved. In a way, the fact that you burn the earth and create sort of a fossil. Because a fossil is a moment in time where something has burnt at very high temperature and imprinted whatever was there, anything organic, from leaves to animals or any organism, imprinted, like it gets an imprint. And I was thinking, you know, making ceramics is like something that defies entropy in a way and whatever we do now is like a time capsule for the scenario that say there is a disaster where something heats the earth and we all die or whatever, someone at some point may find ceramics that survived this situation and again in an archaeological timeline is our current cultural product. Computer and technological data can be easily lost but ceramics can last almost forever.
Is it important then to have that view of longevity when you start working on a piece?
It is not something I consciously think of when I make something, it is just something that I feel is sometimes thought provoking. I find it so sort of special that what I make can have that longevity. It gives you a very different perspective of time somehow, much beyond our lifespan. So this fascinates me a lot. I don’t think of creating something that someone will interpret in a thousand years but I am creating something that I feel comes out of me the way I am now and hopefully someone in the future may understand something about our time if they look at my work and all the other people who are contemporary artists working with clay.
Why is being contemporary important to you?
It’s not important to me. It is kind of what comes naturally to me. I don’t consciously choose to be contemporary. It just happens. What I am saying is, I am not diffing up an old technique and trying to recreate an old technique or something. I am just doing what I feel aesthetically gives me pleasure making and looking at and I consider it more honest in a sense than maybe someone who is trying to do something with a different intention. I don’t know if that makes sense. My intention is not to make something necessarily that is considered contemporary, I just feel that what I am making with the cultural baggage I have is contemporary because I am living now and my exposure to this culture is coming out somehow in the work I make.
Does your location influence your creativity?
Yes, definitely. Imagine that from my workshop, which is a north facing place, so in winter it is quite cold. I don’t get the sun much, but the light that I get here is so good, and the shadows and I am constantly looking at the sky and the sea and they are always a different color. It influences me immensely. How being here and being exposed to this environment, you know, I get pleasure out of just looking at the colors around me so that comes out naturally in my work, I think, because I love things that don’t have color at my house I wouldn’t necessarily put all the things I make because I want the calmness. But when I make things I want to have the color to give me pleasure somehow.
You have a mixture of functional and sculptural pieces for viewing. Is it important to have a mix for you to have both?
The thing is that my brain, my consciousness makes me want to make functional things because I feel as though I might as well make something that is useful rather than just fulfill desire to make sculptural only pieces. And I think it is important also for the people who buy things that they can enjoy drinking from a cup that fits well. I enjoy myself, experiencing food and drinks in vessels that are really pleasing. I think it does affect a lot the experience so I am very interested in that aspect. And on the other hand I am very interested at the same time in making shapes that I haven’t made before, you know, constantly changing involving the shapes, adding things. I can’t stop and just produce one thing. I have seen many ceramicists who like to find it very soothing to do an array of the same thing. I am not that person.
Now that you are established what is your marketing strategy now?
That’s a tough question. I don’t have a very specific marketing strategy. The most I have done of marketing, consciously marketing myself, is I collaborate with 2 companies on the island where my work is exposed there. In one shop they resell something. Basically it is a soap factory, a small traditional soap place, where I make them a soap dish that goes with their soap and I sell their soaps in my shop and they sell my soap dishes there. So we kind of give each other, we recommend each other this way to our customers. That is kind of a very traditional thing to do in a sense. It is not necessarily electronic marketing, which is a thing most people benefit from. But, yeah, my Instagram is definitely a good place where people find me, but I haven’t at all yet exploited this medium. And I haven’t yet done an e-shop. I have been wanting to do one but I haven’t had enough things to put in an e-shop yet. I keep running out of things.
Is there anything else that you wish I would have asked you for this conversation?
Well, there is something I would like to share with you. I have a spare room, a resting room, with a bed and everything, and a beautiful bathroom. So that is something that I started already using for internships and residencies and hopefully people out there who are interested might contact me and join the team for some time. It would be an exchange of experiences and ideas. Ideally we would like this at some point to lead to exhibitions and do joint projects. Yeah, it’s just a future plan, but the internship started this summer so maybe there are people out there who would like to join.
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Instagram: @myrtozirini