Preserved Garden
Marten Herma Anderson, 2026

glazed stoneware
38 x 27 x 6 cm

1.750 € (incl. 19% VAT)
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This series began the way many of Anderson’s works do: with something small falling out of place. A pressed flower slipped from between the pages of a book, the kind his grandmother used to tuck in as bookmarks, and the gesture stayed with him.

The wall pieces that followed sit at the intersection of sweet memory and architectural constraint. Ceramic forms shaped by pressure, heat, and gravity, they carry the quiet logic of things that grow within systems not designed for them: a garden pressing up against a facade, or a child becoming himself within the rigid geometry of society. Botanical silhouettes emerge and dissolve within contained frames, never fully escaping the structure that holds them.

The glazes are where contradiction lives most openly. Their metallic, iridescent surface, the kind of shimmer you might find in car-tuning culture or in the silver-foiled prefab walls of the early 1990s, is simultaneously seductive and unsettling. Beautiful, synthetic, and somehow honest about both.

A third strand runs through the series: landscape as memory container. Fragments of a particular hill on Rügen, where a brick church stood watch over plum trees and wildflower meadows, and where the fields dissolved into the Baltic. Cold air, sheep, early light. The ceramic surface becomes a site for this kind of remembering, not nostalgic in a sentimental sense, but archaeological. Pressing something into matter so it doesn’t disappear entirely. Like all of Anderson’s work, these pieces resist easy categorization. They are wall-hung objects that behave like sculpture, glaze tests that became finished works, and small containers for things that remain vast inside memory.

all works from Marten Herma Anderson
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