chili
keramiek
The artist Su Melo, born in the Republic of Chile and currently based in the Netherlands, studied Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. Her practice has been gaining increasing visibility in the Netherlands, and her works are included in the collections of the Frans Hals Museum (Netherlands) and the Mondriaan Fund Office (Netherlands). In recent years, Melo has created works that expand our perception through mutual relationships between artwork, viewer, and space, including installation pieces that encourage public participation. Her large-scale work Congress Room. Way of Being Ecocratic, created during her 2024 residency at The European Ceramic Work Center (EKWC), is currently installed in the garden of a medical center in Amsterdam. By acknowledging ecocratic laws—which grant trees the same rights as sentient beings—this work invites people to sit within it, proposing a possibility in which nature and humans exist and relate to one another on equal terms.
Melo stayed for approximately six months as a studio artist at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shiga, Japan. Motivated by an interest in Japanese spiritual culture, she traveled not only within Shigaraki but also to Kanazawa, Shimane, and Ise, encountering Japan’s distinctive perspectives on spiritual culture and aesthetics. She notes that she sensed cultural affinities between Andean cultures, and Japan, particularly in how animistic traditions remain inseparable from everyday life.
In Japan, it is believed that deities dwell within all things in the universe. The reverence and sense of intimacy toward non-human entities that Melo experienced here—especially when contrasted with rationalism values in the West—has profoundly influenced her artistic practice. Tree Hugger, attached directly to a living tree and designed as a device into which a person inserts their head to become physically united with the tree, is completed only when the human, the tree, and the artwork come together. The artist will show three of her Tree Hugger in Lustwarande (Tillburg) from June 14th until September 27th. Many of Melo’s works were fired in a wood-fired kiln. Her practice consistently reflects on the relationship between humans and the environment; the process of wood firing, in which the final outcome is entrusted to fire, is itself suggestive of the idea that human action is also part of nature.
Inspired by bird’s-eye perspectives found in Japanese art, Melo’s small, rounded works evoke a panoramic inner landscape reminiscent of distant mountain ranges viewed from afar. Here too, some works may be held and touched. Mountains once observed from above like a bird can now be placed in one’s hands and drawn close to the chest, shifting the relationship between viewer and artwork from macro to micro. Through these changes in perspective and through direct contact with the tactile surface of ceramic, the works offer far more sensory experience than one might initially imagine. Intimacy emerges by connecting oneself with others and forming new relationships. Melo’s works function as agents that enable relationships not only among humans, but equally between ourselves and natural and artificial objects alike.
