'A cup of me' for Marie Technau, 2022
In November, I visited Marie Technau in her small pottery studio in Mainz, as she was investigating how we interact with our everyday objects at the time and created ceramic drinking vessels that bring people back to the here and now, giving them back the slowness and calm that often seems to have been lost in our fast-paced world. "We rush from event to event, work through to-do lists at lightning speed, do several things at the same time, nothing really, but at least we are efficient. We eat our food between meetings, by the evening we've forgotten what we had for lunch and so it goes on throughout our daily practices. Coffee in the morning is drunk next to the laptop and we don't even realise how the cup is suddenly empty and we haven't even tasted what we've been drinking. This may also be because the shiny, white Ikea cup sits perfectly in our hand. So perfect that it goes unnoticed and disappears in our hectic everyday lives. When was the last time you did something consciously? Without listening to music, being glued to your mobile phone or thinking about what still needs to be done?"