Gaby Mlynarczyk is a UK-born artist and designer who has spent over 30 years living in the United States, the last thirteen years living in Southern California, where she participated in countless beach clean-ups. Her current body of work is driven by this experience and is an examination of the great pacific garbage patch, and the sea life unwittingly making it home.
She has taught wheel throwing and hand-building classes since the 1990s in New York, Los Angeles, and now London. She is a recent graduate of the MA Ceramics and Glass program at the Royal College of Art, London. She has been awarded the Charlotte Fraser Prize for excellence and shortlisted for the 2024 Hyundai Awards for sustainability in aesthetics and craft.
Gaby is currently a Ceramic artist in residence at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, where her work will focus on regenerative systems for ceramic practice as well as sustainable materials research and alternative forms of firing. Selected works can be found at the Mint Gallery in London. She has also displayed her work at the Museum of Fine Art in Jingdezhen, China.
Visit Gaby Mlynarczyk’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2023-2024
As an artist, I think of myself as an explorer and seeker, hungry always for more, making something out of nothing is my oxygen. Forever on the hunt for self-expression as a maker, I explore and embrace unpredictability, loosely borrowing from Rococo-esque motifs and the Ikebana ethos of making the inanimate come alive. Clay with its vibrant materiality becomes my partner in creative, haptic “crimes”, possesses me almost, to produce what I feel are cerebral yet instinctual, pieces, each one an autobiography of our dance together, brimming with emotional detritus.
My current body of work is inspired by the intersection of the environment and human experience, or what happens when you make soup with man-made disasters + marine and plant biology, seasoned with a heavy dose of Darwinism. It is an investigation into environments and ecosystems being destroyed by climate change and corporate greed as well as the planet’s response to this attack on its wellbeing. In some instances, the organisms affected by these incursions have evolved to assuage negative consequences, as in the sea life currently making a new home of the great pacific garbage patch. In turn this has taken my enquiries in another direction altogether, how the planet and its organisms change to survive and thrive in these hostile conditions. After all, life on earth and its evolution has been driven for thousands of years by constantly transforming its response to the environment’s metamorphosis and its aggressions. With my speculative designs I imagine new modes of existence and explore how marine life becomes one with ocean plastics as humanity is becoming one with the microplastics we digest.
In the pursuit of sustainability, many of my works are aggregates constructed from a collection of salvaged ceramics, connected using a low fire ceramic mortar developed at the RCA. This eco conscious theme continues with the inclusion of bioplastics made from seaweed-based agar and fish gelatin often taking the place of glaze.
In my practice I seek to fulfill the role of storyteller and activist pursuing social change.
