Anja Bartels
Anja Bartels, originally from Hamburg, Germany, discovered pottery-making while living in an intentional community in rural Virginia. Passion ignited, she returned home to study with a master potter in the German Ceramics Guild. With a strong focus on craftsmanship and technical skill, the apprenticeship provided Anja with a deep love for porcelain and its millennia old tradition. After three years, Anja graduated to become a potter journeyman. She moved back to the United States and was accepted as an artist in residence at Odyssey ClayWorks.
Anja’s nautically themed porcelain employs a number of different techniques including slip trailing, sgraffito, poured and sprayed glazes. Her sea urchin inspired pieces are thrown and trimmed on the wheel, then several thousand small slip trailed spikes are applied using a surgical bulb while she listens to books on tape about shipwrecks. The interior of her pieces are glazed with several different layered glazes, always striving to capture feeling of the ocean itself in them: from glassy and calm to stormy and foreboding. The exterior surface is left bare, showcasing the beautiful white porcelain clay and slip decoration. Anja’s personal aesthetic and process are consistent and highly developed, reflecting her upbringing in a port town and her love of ships and the northern Atlantic.
It is as if her pieces were born in the sea.
