ANKE BUCHMANN

Honouring the quiet evidence of human touch

With Traces of Process, Anke Buchmann revisits and expands one of her earliest vase concepts, first conceived in 2018 in dialogue with the archive of a Paris-based fashion designer. What began as an exploration of form and material language has evolved into a distilled study of how objects carry the memory of their making.

The limited series is defined by two primary shapes that stand in conversation with one another—related yet distinct, echoing the quiet tension between structure and softness that characterises much of Buchmann’s sculptural vocabulary.

In this new edition, geometric clarity meets the intentional openness of process. Minimalist silhouettes and a restrained colour palette create a formal foundation against which subtle irregularities come into focus: a slight lean, the faint residue of a seamline, a hand-drawn contour that refuses perfection. These gestures—honest, uncorrected, human—invite close attention. They shift the vessels from purely functional objects into artefacts of time, movement, and touch.

Traces of Process proposes that beauty lies not in the elimination of imperfection, but in the precise moment where form, intention, and the maker’s presence intersect. Each piece becomes a quiet record—an analogue memory—of the dialogue between resistance and yield that defines the act of working with clay.

In a time increasingly shaped by digital acceleration and AI-driven efficiency, this work stands as a counter-gesture.

By foregrounding process over perfection, the series invites a slower form of looking and reconnects us with our humanness.