Jana Francke is a bad designer*. Antagonistic and antithetical, she explores ways to undercut the mechanisms that inform collective and individual self-perception.
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Jana Francke graduated in product and process design (UdK, 2017). Her work is informed as much by her formal training as by her artistic and artisanal approach.
Francke's work can be described as elegantly executed brute dark humour, full of morbid fascination and aesthetically lustful play, obsessed with the question of who we are as human animals, and how we find and place ourselves in - and versus - what we consider to be ‘nature’ or ‘the world’.
Key to her aesthetic is the embodiment and physical reality of being alive, expressed in her ceramic and metal works that are created entirely by hand.
Her reverence of flesh as the sanctuary of life, mind and spirit clashes with traditional concepts of aesthetics or functionality. ‘Normality’, ‘correctness’ or ‘propriety’ give way to a shameless celebration of the animated, ambiguous, warped, grotesque, viscous and amorphous. She works the experience of being alive into alluring and seductive objects.
"I am equally fascinated by our capacity to love and create, as by our capacity to destroy and be cruel. I don’t see black/white or, rather, good/evil in any of that, I think we need to embrace it all and realise that there is beauty and allure and seduction in all of it. Only if we see our capacity for cruelty, for example, as an integral part of ourselves that forever has played a vital role in our survival, can we actually come to terms with our cruelty in today’s world and context. Universally condemning an aspect of ourselves means ignoring it, not looking at it."
Jana Francke graduated in product and process design (UdK, 2017). Her work is informed as much by her formal training as by her artistic and artisanal approach.
Francke's work can be described as elegantly executed brute dark humour, full of morbid fascination and aesthetically lustful play, obsessed with the question of who we are as human animals, and how we find and place ourselves in - and versus - what we consider to be ‘nature’ or ‘the world’.
Key to her aesthetic is the embodiment and physical reality of being alive, expressed in her ceramic and metal works that are created entirely by hand.
Her reverence of flesh as the sanctuary of life, mind and spirit clashes with traditional concepts of aesthetics or functionality. ‘Normality’, ‘correctness’ or ‘propriety’ give way to a shameless celebration of the animated, ambiguous, warped, grotesque, viscous and amorphous. She works the experience of being alive into alluring and seductive objects.
"I am equally fascinated by our capacity to love and create, as by our capacity to destroy and be cruel. I don’t see black/white or, rather, good/evil in any of that, I think we need to embrace it all and realise that there is beauty and allure and seduction in all of it. Only if we see our capacity for cruelty, for example, as an integral part of ourselves that forever has played a vital role in our survival, can we actually come to terms with our cruelty in today’s world and context. Universally condemning an aspect of ourselves means ignoring it, not looking at it."