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Sybille Abel-Kremer
Soul Pieces. Article on Sybille Abel-Kremer, published in the international ceramics magazine Neue Keramik/New Ceramics in September/October 2023.
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Soul Pieces
Travel and discovery have always had a deep influence on Sybille Abel-Kremer (Wiesbaden, 1954), not only on her own personal development but also on her creative evolution. At school she excelled at languages, was a passionate reader of literature and, after sitting her exams, was expected to study law, medicine, business administration or something similarly “prestigious”. However, always her own person, she felt a greater calling towards biology, geography and philosophy, subjects she felt would better satisfy an inner yearning to understand what she considered to be important and would provide her with greater insight into what was going on in the world and what connects us. Not least, these subjects also involved travelling and excursions, which enabled her to soak up unfamiliar surroundings and learn about different cultures, feeding her innate curiosity about how other people lived.
As a young woman, impressionable and still finding herself, Abel-Kremer was handed the opportunity to travel across the Atlantic on an extended visit to California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Central America, during which she enrolled in art classes, visited museums and galleries and became deeply inspired by the extraordinary landscapes, ancient rock formations and especially by the time she spent on a Native American Hopi reservation. It was experiences like these that would establish her lifelong love of different cultures and exploration, which she would later continue in the Middle East, North Africa, Cameroon and parts of Asia. Each journey became a resource for new memories and materials, which would come to be reflected in her creative work, from the natural curvature of Pueblo coiled baskets and the undulations of desert sand dunes to the intricacies of coral and contortions of lava flows. But this period of travel and discovery also served to instil in her a sense of independence, self-confidence and resilience: necessary qualities for a ceramic artist in the making. It is the reason why she feels that, looking back, it would have been difficult for her to start ceramics at an earlier age than she did. The physical process of shaping something with your hands makes it almost impossible to articulate immediately the nuances of your creative endeavour, but also to conceal any vulnerabilities in artistic expression, especially in the case of ceramics. It is a learning curve in which there are very few short cuts and the type of apprenticeship that most artists have to undertake in one form or another to develop their artistic sensibilities.
On her return to Germany, Abel-Kremer graduated from university, got married and took up various teaching positions. Although she had always been attracted to a variety of arts and crafts, she continued to be particularly drawn to the tactile immediacy of working with clay. And it was during a hiatus in her teaching career that afforded her more time to spend on experimentation and gaining experience in a number of studios. She soon realised that ceramics was the vocation she wanted to pursue. Undaunted by the formidable demands and hurdles of undertaking another extended course of study, she applied to the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, passed the matriculation examination and was accepted into the ceramics department of the renowned German ceramicist Volker Ellwanger. Ellwanger would remain a trusted mentor and sounding board throughout Abel-Kremer’s career and introduced her to the work of other influential figures of German studio ceramics, including the likes of Bontjes van Beek, Walter Popp and Richard Bampi. But also indirectly to the evocative appeal of Asian ceramics by way of the Keramische Werkstatt Margaretenhöhe in Essen and South Korean ceramicist Young-Jae Lee. Later she was intrigued by the simple honesty of early medieval pottery and was particularly fascinated by the cultivated refinement of the Chinese Song Dynasty she discovered in museums in Paris and England and by the expressive masterpieces of the Japanese Momoyama period. All of which would leave an indelible impression on her own aesthetics. It was a foundation that helped her develop what would become an intuitive understanding of balanced form and harmony as something that could attract personal attachment and which exhibits a natural expression of sensitivity. Work she identifies as Seelenstücke, or soul pieces.
In 1995, she moved to Markkleeberg, just outside Leipzig, where she acquired a second-hand gas-fired kiln and set up her own studio. Since then she has been working as a ceramicist, exhibiting her work in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, most recently in Deventer in the autumn of 2022. She also participates regularly in international ceramics fairs.
Essentially, Abel-Kremer’s ceramics share the same intrinsic sense of sincerity and purpose as the pots of European antiquity, exhibiting a sculptural quality that is rooted in the deep history of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Beaker cultures. There is no escaping the seriousness and integrity of its artistic intent. At the same time her work is completely authentic. It avoids the limiting constraints of idle imitation through the conscious application of a rich repertoire of natural colours and living surfaces produced by personalised glaze recipes, an iron-rich, grogged clay mix and multiple reductive firings. This deep connection with other cultures and our distant past not only acknowledges the relevancy of a collective heritage through the context of substance and form, but also embraces our inherent bond with the natural environment and landscape through organic tones and textures, often achieved by harvesting and repurposing materials she collects in her local vicinity or on her travels and incorporating these in her clay and glazes. Like personal memories fixed permanently in stone. It is an aesthetic that is self-assured, resilient and unapologetically idiosyncratic, a personal style in which she finds consolation in being at one with the objects she creates. Ultimately, when successful, such vessels are transformed into objects of contemplation and are able to stand the test of time. They communicate with you and hold your attention, irrespective of who made them or when they were made. Volker Ellwanger succinctly described Abel-Kremer’s work as “emerging from the collective cultural memory of humankind”. As such, it forms a continuum and provides a natural link between peoples, cultures and communities, between what has been and what will be. It is a symbiotic relationship, bound neither by time nor physical boundaries. It is an idiom that belongs to a universal language, spoken in a quiet, understated voice. And it is this language that connects us all.
Neale Williams
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Sybille Abel-Kremer was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1954. She initially studied Biology and Geography and qualified as a teacher before studying fine arts and ceramics under the renowned German ceramicist Prof. Volker Ellwanger at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She has travelled widely and has run her own studio in Markkleeberg near Leipzig since 1995, where she is a member of various art and ceramics associations. She is a regular presence at international ceramic fairs and has exhibited her work in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.