Arkadiusz Szwed is an artist, designer, and professor. His works are a collage of technical knowledge, sensitivity and creativity. He represents a generation of ceramists who believe that the designer should intentionally and deliberately disturb the technological process to obtain a form that shows the relationship between the process and piece of work. Szwed is involved in applied design and conceptual design, as well as education in industrial design. He graduated from the Faculty of Painting at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce and Design Management at the Da Vinci Collegium in Poznan, Poland. For many years, Szwed was a close assistant of Marek Cecula – educated under his watchful eye and gaining knowledge by witnessing the works of Modus Design, as well as accompanying him during the creation of Design Centrum Kielce and Cmielow Design Studio. He runs his own ceramics studio at the School of Form of SWPS University in Warsaw. He is a professor in the domestic design department; Art Director of the Glitch Lab collective. His works have been shown at prestigious design festivals and exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including Designblok, London Design Festival, V&A Museum, Gdynia Design Days, Museum Europaischer Kulturen, and others.
Visit Arkadiusz Szwed’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2016-2022
My adventure with ceramics began with practice and gaining experience in design studios and porcelain factories, where I learned craftsmanship. Today, I see myself as a pirate hacking ceramic processes, searching for new forms through experimentation, humorous and clever associations, and playing with the material. I am inspired mostly by pop culture, comics, animated series and computer games. I work mainly with porcelain, which processes I try to mutate until I achieve the intended effects.
During prototyping and modeling, I use unusual materials such as balloons, gloves, condoms, stockings, glass balls, or other seemingly unnecessary items, searching for new shapes. I am very interested in factory processes, which I transform into my own language. The final objects are an illustration of my way of thinking about contemporary ceramics.
In addition to my own artistic activity, I try to educate by telling stories about the value of human work, as in the project ‘People from the Porcelain Factory,’ and tell about the ceramic material resource, like in ‘Fuck the Porcelain’ project as a member of the Glitch Lab collective.
