Kunstkatalog Stefanie Brehm

62 It still sounds a little as if you‘re juggling with work and family life. Absolutely, though being a mother has always tended to be more of a help than a hin- drance career-wise. I see them as two vocations that go hand in hand. When the children were very small, I sometimes only had a couple of hours a day for my art. It made me organise my work process a lot more efficiently. I knew that I had to get things done fast. Time pressure often blocks artists, but in my case, it always left me no choice but to get to the point. I have achieved a lot more in shorter stints than in longer work periods. De- cisions about colours and forms had to be made much faster and so naturally they were a lot more intuitive. Ruminating on things for a long time sometimes distracts you away from your original instincts. In a way, time pressure acts as an impetus. This year you are going to take up an artist-in-residency at Prösitz near Leipzig that is especially aimed at artists who are also mothers. Do you think that the art world is focusing more strongly on this, or is there still room for improvement? The Prösitz artist estate is the only project I know of that caters so intensively for female artists by providing childcare for their children. Therefore, I would say that we could do with more initiatives of this nature. Unfortunately, many residencies aren’t interested in this aspect at all. In a way it‘s a double-edged sword, because the children have to be willing to leave their familiar surroundings for a longer period and the artist is exposed to a lot of mental pressure. However, I have heard about planned residencies in which scholarships are granted to home-based artists. The women artists have access to a fully-fledged mentor- ship programme, but they can continue to work from home and use the existing infra- structure. That would also work for me. As an artist with children you can’t always go to places at the drop of a hat. Your work always radiates materiality and plasticity. You combine your ceramic works with polyurethane, which is a rather unconventional material mix. How do you create correspondences between the two materials? Ceramic has been one of my main materials since my training. However, the art academy and its many workshops gave me the chance to experiment with other materials. Why I’m so attracted to plastic is probably because it is such a common feature of our lives. Plastic is everywhere and its surface qualities and appearance are often very ap- pealing. You can imbue the material with an incredible intensity of colour. The natural brilliance of the plastic further enhances the vibrancy of the colours. Plastic offers a much wider and more extravagant range of colours that includes neon shades, which come out perfectly. You don‘t get this in ceramics, although even there, I tend to depart from traditional colours like blue, grey, brown and ochre or I combine them with different colours. Using a spray gun in a painterly sense is also atypical for ceramics. My approach to working with materials therefore tends to be fairly unconventional. Although plastic is a much more modern material than ceramic with its very archaic air, both share a similar surface appearance. Interview Stefanie Brehm “As an artist, I work on an introspective basis” by Katja Andreae