Nora Arrieta is a sculptor and ceramic artist who combines the materiality of clay with traditional craft references and digital forms of application in ceramics. Her work explores the relationship between the emotional states of an individual and the fast-paced artificial environments of physical and digital places. What almost all her objects have in common is that they are covered with a rich and painterly glaze surface.
Arrieta’s work has been shown in various international exhibitions, such as the Pulverturm in Oldenburg, the Keramikmuseum Westerwald in Höhr-Grenzhausen, the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop, the Galerie Handwerk München, Keramion Frechen, The Clay Studio Philadelphia, Site Brookly Gallery in New York and Eigen Art Lab in Berlin.
Nora Arrieta was born in Leipzig in 1989. She studied sculpture at the Art Academy Berlin-Weißensee and the Dresden Fine Art Academy and completed a master’s in ceramics at Alfred University. She was a ceramic teaching fellow at the Tabor Academy. Other professional residencies and experiences include an artist-in-residence at MOkS, Estonia, a one-semester guest artist stay at Syracuse University, and short group residencies at Campos Guiterrez Medellin and the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium.
Arrieta’s work has received several awards, including 2nd prize at the 15th Westerwald Prize 2024, the “Keramik im Pulverturm” prize from the Stadtmuseum Oldenburg, the Grassi-Sparkassenpreis, the Frechener Keramikpreis and the Mart Stam Award. Her work is part of several collections, including the Grassimuseum Leipzig, the Fama Kunststiftung, the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and various private collections.
Nora Arrieta lives and works in Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany, where she also works as an educator and workshop manager in the ceramics department of the Institute for Ceramics and Glass Art, where she is also responsible for firing the historic Kannofen kiln, a living monument to salt firing in the Westerwald region.
Visit Nora Arrieta’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2021-2024
In my work, I examine the emotions and consciousness that surround us in the 21st century: the assimilation of the experiential and the fantastic in real and digital spaces, global mobility and the constantly growing sensory overload of information and consumer goods in an unmanageable network of apps, images, daily news and trends. These aspects of contemporary consciousness have led to a mystification and transfiguration of the environment, a consciousness that has long since become accustomed to the inexplicability of technical entities, the overstraining of the senses and the juxtaposition of history, fiction and reality in everyday life, while still striving for a romantic nature that has long since been lost in its naturalness. However, I also infiltrate these experiences and assessments with humor and irony in order to perhaps also portray this discrepancy between playful joy and dystopia.
My pictorial worlds thematize these interactions and paradigms, drawing on models from the Middle Ages, the Baroque and the magical realism of ceramic works from early high cultures. They are sustained by fired and colored glazed clay, which is intended to transfer and preserve them into a lasting material and cultural memory of our time. The glaze functions as a material and metaphor for emotional states; the viscosity, the flowing surfaces and the color can be read psycologically and serve as a reference to shimmering screens with fluid information. I also use newer techniques such as ceramic 3D printing or photo transfer to incorporate aspects of the digital and the reproducible into my works.
