THE BODY AS MATERIAL

Ceramics, gesture and audacity: Mutina with Faye Toogood and BUIT. Valencia with CUAL estudio bring the human body back to the centre of contemporary design

At a moment when technology accelerates and abstracts, two ceramic companies choose to slow down and touch. To start from the body, its form, its nature. Not as provocation, but as an act of necessity. As if clay, right now, were the most urgent material in existence.

Mutina and Buit. Valencia do not know each other, do not collaborate, do not share the same market. And yet at this moment they speak the same language: that of those who believe ceramics does not only serve to cover surfaces, but to say something true about being human.

Two companies, two women designers, one direction

Faye Toogood and CUAL estudio did not seek each other out. But the moment their work arrives together says something. It says that ceramics, at this precise point in history, is choosing the body. The real one, the imperfect one, the one with eyes and noses and mouths and sexuality. The one technology cannot replicate.

In an era that produces weightless images and gestureless objects, clay that remembers the contact of a hand is perhaps the most revolutionary thing there is.

There is also a shared geography. Mutina comes from Fiorano Modenese, at the heart of the Emilian ceramic district, one of the territories with the highest concentration of ceramic expertise in the world, with a history rooted in the postwar years and an industrial vocation that has never stopped engaging with aesthetic research.

BUIT. Valencia was born in an equally deep-rooted context: Valencian ceramics has a millenary tradition, and the region continues to be one of the most dynamic production hubs in Europe. One is an established and international presence, the other an emerging and experimental voice. But both come from a land that has known clay for centuries, and in both one recognises the same restlessness: that of those who are not satisfied with making beautiful ceramics, but want ceramics to say something.

Faces & Figures, Faye Toogood x Mutina

“When I began thinking about Faces & Figures, I was not interested in starting from form. I wanted to start from sensation. From the sensation of clay meeting the body.” Faye Toogood

Faces & Figures is born from the encounter between the body and clay, from that primordial relationship in which the material receives the gesture, preserves its memory and returns the trace of contact. One of the most original and recognisable figures in the contemporary creative scene, Faye Toogood brings to Mutina a material and instinctive research that, through models, clay maquettes and explorations of the human figure, translates gesture into fluid and essential forms. “For me, Mutina is an attentive and determined reality. A force, a reality capable of generating change,” says the designer.

The result is a collection articulated in five complementary systems: Plain Tiles in three formats; Figure, two organic shapes that compose a single element; Eyes, Ears, Mouths, Noses, Nipples, figurative high-relief subjects depicting parts of the body; Face, the face as an architectural element; Body, a new element in the Mutina Bricks series. A system capable of bringing into space a silent and deeply human presence, transforming the language of sculpture into architecture.

Gina, CUAL estudio x BUIT. Valencia

There is an even bolder gesture in Castellón. The Gina collection, designed by Valencian duo CUAL estudio for BUIT. Valencia, is born from a precise claim: to restore to the vagina the naturalness and freedom that belong to it.

In the history of European art, from ancient Greece onward, the concrete representation of female sexuality was systematically avoided, in both painting and sculpture. Gina starts from this absence and transforms it into a project. Two ceramic cladding pieces that generate a pattern with infinite combinations of filled and empty spaces, in raw stoneware, without glazes or artifice: only the purity of the material, its composition, its volume, its form.

It is not provocation for its own sake. It is the choice to restore nobility to what has long been hidden, using the same tools of authorial ceramics, matter, gesture, time, that Mutina and Toogood use on the other side of the Mediterranean.