Though Nataliya Zuban is steeped in the traditional ceramic production of her native town of Opishnia (known as the ceramic capital of Ukraine), she applies her deep understanding of material and process in strikingly unconventional ways as a window into natural processes. In the “Forest” series (2016–17), she references biologist Raoul Franço’s ideas that plants are able to communicate with the outside world, capable of observing events and storing information about them. The works in her “Ruins” (2019–21) and “Ruins/Interventions” (2021) series explore how landscapes change over time, drawing on anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), a book about how life persists even after the supposed death of a place. The “Coexistence” series (2023–24) delves into the delicate balance between coexistence and parasitism, as ceramic structures are taken over by glazes that transform their forms permanently after firing.
Following residencies in South Korea, China, and in Oisterwijk, the Netherlands, Zuban began a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2023, where she discovered new kinetic possibilities for her work. witnessing an event (2025), exhibited at this year’s Open Studios, takes a more violent and systemic approach than her previous works. With the addition of movement comes sound, as the elements of this auto-destructive “machine” and the objects fed into it grind against each other, breaking each other down to create new, fragmented forms.
Beth Williamson: Your initial training was a six-year course in applied arts with a ceramics major at Lviv National Academy of Arts in Lviv, Ukraine (2009–15), where you earned an MFA. Then you undertook an interdisciplinary PhD at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw, Poland (2018–21). What were those experiences like for you? How did they help to shape your practice?
Nataliya Zuban: I was born in a place that is known as a center of ceramics in Ukraine. I was never interested in working with clay, because there was so much around, but it just happened. We have large clay deposits in the region. During the time of the Soviet Union, there was a big factory. When I was young, half the population of the village was involved in ceramic production. I started then and just continued. I went to study at the National Academy of Arts, a school of applied art in Lviv, then after a break, I continued at the Wroclaw Academy. This was an interdisciplinary program where my projects became more experimental and coincided with technological research.
BW: You seem to be always experimenting, testing the limits of the material, exploring possibilities in terms of scale, construction method, and glazing.
NZ: Normal ceramics was never enough for me, but I had no access to other mediums. So, from the very beginning, I was trying to make something out of clay that looked different. At a certain point, I just stopped working. Ceramics as an applied art, which is what I was taught for six years in Ukraine, quickly lost its interest for me. It was then that I began playing with the material, and that led me to the project that I’m doing now. It was very much about just trying things, experimenting.
I developed a glaze for the “Coexistence” series, a crater glaze that expands during firing and creates quite a large volume around the ceramic structure, altering what I had constructed. Experimenting with material in that sense is not about form anymore, because it changes a lot and you don’t have control over it. I was developing this approach and trying to get control, to get more or less predictable results, but it was also very much about transformation of the object. You develop the object for a long time and then fire it, and everything is completely different. I was trying to exaggerate that idea.
BW: You’ve been resident at the Rijksakademie for almost two years now. Has the experience impacted the way you work?
NZ: I think it’s had an enormous impact. I had a chance to experiment a lot and work with the technical specialists. From the beginning, I started developing kinetic works and exploring the qualities of fired clay. I started breaking it. This is a completely new thing for me.
BW: Why do you think things developed in this direction?
NZ: It was a combination of things. At first, I really wanted to experiment, and I had the chance to work in other workshops and with different mediums. Another thing that I think is important is that the war in Ukraine has impacted the subjects that I’m working with. They’ve become more violent. This is very difficult to deal with, as is the whole situation in the world right now; I feel it is a really fragile time. That is what led me to the works I am making now.
BW: How difficult is it to develop works that will ultimately be broken or destroyed?
NZ: Developing works like this is extremely stressful because you cannot test them properly. I don’t know until the end if it’s going to break, how it’s going to break, and how dangerous it may be for people nearby. When we tested the idea, it was a different kind of breaking. I don’t have much attachment to the thing I’ve made, so breaking it is not something that hurts me. It is a lot of work to make it all happen, and it’s really exciting.
BW: Can you tell me more about witnessing an event (2025)?
NZ: Honestly, I am still trying to think it through for myself.The idea was to make a self-destructive machine. The object would function as a machine and also act as a reflection on what is happening in the global system and how the system collapses. It is similar in conception to a previous piece, witnessing an event (2024), which was a large table with shards of fired clay. It should have been quite a stable piece but after it was broken, I realized it looked much better than before. Still, it seemed unfinished to me. It was important to keep the same amount of fired clay, so I ground it down into a fine powder using a jaw crusher—then I knew it was complete.
BW: What has the residency been like?
NZ: It has been quite intense in a way. It is nice having time and space to work, but that also takes a lot of energy, a lot of mental energy. I think that I’ve changed a lot during my time at the Rijksakademie. With this new piece, it is very important to create a moment when people can feel something, because the work resides in the moment of the breaking. It’s exciting because as I drop each object in, the machine tries to break it. Each time, I’m not sure if it’s going to happen, and for me, it’s exhilarating to see that it’s finally working. At the same time, it’s a really wild thing. The individual active elements of the machine are grinding themselves and each other; they also get damaged while they’re trying to crush the objects. That’s why you have the sound. The idea is that it destroys itself. I think I’ve started to see my medium really differently.
