Work Designers in Residence part of ABBY's latest exhibition

Design Region Kortrijk welcomed three young international designers for Designers in Residence Kortrijk. For three months, designers Lou Cruard, Kato Herbots and Uğis Albiņš immersed themselves in intensive design research, inspired by the region's rich ceramic tradition and its transformative power.

Lou Cruard explores the meaning of the brick wall as a structure that can separate, but also connect. To this end, she uses her own vanissage technique and investigates how walls shape social interaction and influence the perception of space. Through this process, she explores how art can reveal new ways of looking at shared and intermediate space.

Terra Formata by Kato Herbots investigates contaminated soil from former clay pits in Kortrijk as an alternative raw material for ceramics. Although clay extraction has long been a defining feature of the ceramic industry in the region, these same pits also play a largely invisible role as landfill sites within waste processing systems.

By transforming soil that is normally buried, discarded or considered hazardous into functional ceramic objects, Terra Formata raises the question of what local resources are still available to us today. The project responds to the landscape shaped by extraction and waste, and explores new forms of production on a polluted planet.

Uģis Albiņš uses his own visual observations in the city of Kortrijk to reveal connections and mechanisms that exist between the different layers of urban life. Desert dust or industrial dust, each dust particle as an addressable unit, emphasises material infrastructures, entropy and physical residues. Each lost and found object thus becomes a 'unit', formed by chance and its specific location, and later develops into part of his installation.

In the exhibition Coup de Théâtre. A Play of Clay, Abby highlights the theatrical character of ceramics through remarkable historical and contemporary pieces.