One Perfect Thing: Inge Vincents’s Porcelain Ceramics
“The Danish artist’s ghost white, paper-thin creations stun in their bare-bone simplicity.
It was porcelain’s translucency that attracted Inge Vincents to the material—something about the way daylight could shine through the sheer clay and almost illuminate it, which happens with no other ceramic material. So painting her pieces with colored glazes has never crossed the Danish artist’s mind in the 11 years she’s been making ceramics full-time in Copenhagen.
Vincents remembers falling in love with clay at just four years old, when she was handed a ball of it at an after-school class. But for the majority of her life, potting was just a hobby—she took art classes during high school and university, while she earned a degree in business. But 13 years ago, two years after the birth of her son, Vincents realized that her fascination could become her life’s work, and she enrolled in a two-year technical college for ceramics. Since then, she’s received three awards from Japan’s and Korea’s Ceramic Biennales, among others, and opened a storefront, Keramiker Inge Vincents, now seven years old, on the same block-long street as Michelin-starred restaurant Relæ, Copenhagen’s beloved Coffee Collective, and a number of high-end clothing boutiques. Inside that light-filled shop on Jægersborggade street, every delicate piece glows.
Focusing more on the texture and shape of her pieces, Vincents relishes in simple, bare forms. She says she likes to “work on the edge of the functional,” which best describes her most extensive and unusual style of ceramics. Grouped under what she calls “thinware,” the collection encompasses everything from espresso cups to lanterns to mugs. The pieces, though each one-of-a-kind, share a few characteristics: They’re hand-molded or wheel-thrown, as white as unpainted porcelain can be, and paper-thin, without feeling too fragile to handle. While other hardier porcelain mugs and bowls share shelves with rippled lantern “bags” only millimeters thicker than their paper muses, her thinware works, though delicate, are actually the strongest of her creations.
“People always want to add color, add decoration, just add something, but it’s more difficult to take stuff away,” Vincents said. “But once you’ve taken everything away, you have what’s left behind.”
