Vases in stoneware
Distacco (Detachment)
2025
A border is an apparently defined line and, at the same time, an unstable zone: it separates, protects, and delimits, yet reveals itself only when something puts it under pressure.
In these four vessels, the boundary does not coincide with the object's edge or with its function as a container. Instead, it shifts onto the surface, into the cracks, the gaps, and the points where the material seems to lose adhesion to itself.
Made from wheel-thrown black stoneware, the vessels are coated with a white glaze subject to the phenomenon of crawling. During firing, the glaze contracts, opens, and pulls away from the surface, generating a pattern of irregular cracks reminiscent of sun-scorched, drought-stricken earth.
As often happens in her practice, unpredictability is not an accident to be corrected but a method in itself. Material, temperature, and gravity all participate in the making of the work, allowing forms to emerge that are never entirely predetermined.
Here, the boundary is first and foremost an act of detachment.
The glaze belongs to the vessel and, at the same time, separates from it.
It is skin and fracture, coating and discontinuity, presence and absence.
Rather than covering the surface uniformly, it traverses it like an unstable map, allowing the black stoneware to emerge through the voids between the cracks.
Within these interstices lies the true tension of the work: not between form and content, but between adhesion and rejection, between what remains joined and what tends toward separation.
The surface thus becomes an ambiguous territory.
From a distance it appears compact, almost mineral; up close it dissolves into a fragile network of edges, fissures, and shadows.
Light does not merely illuminate the object—it interprets it. By striking voids and irregularities, it continuously reshapes the perception of form.
Every crack becomes a threshold.
Every shadow reveals the limit of the surface while simultaneously calling it into question.
The vessel is no longer simply a volume, but a rhythm of solids and voids, glaze and absence, light and depth.
The cracks preserve the memory of a movement that occurred during firing: the moment when the glaze yielded, withdrew, and lost contact with the material beneath.
Crawling captures this gesture in the very act of becoming, transforming detachment into image and accident into structure.
But where, then, does the surface end and begin? Where does skin end and begin?
At the point where it separates itself from the outside world, or precisely where it encounters it? Skin protects, yet exposes; it separates, yet remains the primary site of contact. It is what defines our limits and, at the same time, what allows us to be touched. In much the same way, the cracked glaze operates through this ambivalence: beginning and end, contact and separation, protection and vulnerability, visibility and invisibility.
The vessels carry on their surfaces the image of a fracture in time. They do not imitate cracked earth; they share its logic.
Within them, the boundary is not a stable line but a living separation, a distance that continues to generate meaning.
It is the point at which matter detaches from itself and, through that very act of detachment, finds its form.
Anna Merkulova (Moscow, 1995) developed a passion for art at an early age, exploring ceramics, printmaking, and drawing. Trained in graphic design at the Stroganov University in Moscow, she became interested in the relationship between sign, meaning, and visual identity. Working with Paratype, she further expanded her research through calligraphy and printmaking.
She applied this research to branding projects, primarily in the luxury sector, creating visual identities in which the sign becomes identity. After moving to Italy, a desire to reconnect with materiality led her back to ceramics. She founded Malfatto Ceramics in Rome, a project that places imperfection at the core of its aesthetic language.
Today, each piece emerges from the tension between control and error, form and unpredictability, sign and meaning.