Form disassembles and reconfigures itself through physical process, stress, and time. Here, this quest for transformation is enacted through composite bodies made from different types of clay. The process unravels with an embedded structure: a logic of stratification, a repeated slicing, stacking, and compression that generates its own internal rhythm.

One series gives way to fragile, curling sheets, appearing as skins, leaves, fragments of bark, alluding to erosion and decay. They seem to collapse under their own weight, cracking and folding against intention. The process itself, improvised and spontaneous in its foundation, causes the pieces to begin breaking apart at every stage of their making: forming, drying, firing. Collapse becomes formation and formation becomes collapse, rendering the objects into events: episodes of material strain, where layered process and structural failure unfold as a singular gesture.

In another sequence, pieces pressed onto a mould taken from a tree branch take on the appearance of petrified remnants. Through the same striated logic, the process is one of impressionistic mutation. Clay appears as a tree branch to stand as both fossil and fiction. Here, imitation becomes a form of listening, an attunement to the silent logics of growth, decay, and renewal. Following a biomimetic instinct, identity is assembled through layered performance, and like camouflage in the forest, the forms and their patterns blur the boundary where resemblance both conceals and reveals artifice.

A third gesture engages pattern directly: a recognisable tessellated motif begins to deform, lifting from the ground, folding onto walls and columns, slumping under invisible heat. Geometry becomes pliable, optical stability and pattern repetition yield to gravitational pull. The rigid and the measured begin to be a subject of pressure, fatigue, and time.

The three streams explore a shared language of transformation: from structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender. Each piece is more a residue of a negotiation between material behavior and encoded process. The works inhabit a space between emergence and erosion, architecture and accident. What emerges is a slow unraveling—an embrace of the moment where things fall apart, and begin again.

text put together by dd

Developed at EKWC European Ceramic Work Center between February and April 2025.
Exhibited at EKWC (Endtroduction, April 2025 and Test Case XXXIV, May 2025).

Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender
Demetris Shammas - From structure to skin, from memory to form, from control to surrender