Artwork title : Long Life, Health, Virtue, Wealth and Easy Death

Long Life, Health, Virtue, Wealth and Easy Death

Collaboration by Olivia Fero (ceramicist)  and Maciej Urbanek (painter)

www.oliviafero.com 

www.urbanek.co.uk

A monumental triptych of ink-black paper, each sheet four metres long, rises like a scorched forest wall. Maciej Urbanek relinquishes control to water and diluted acrylic, allowing pigment to pool in hollows and drain from ridges until the paper becomes a fossilised riverbed: a stand of birch after fire, a bundle of bleached twigs magnified to architectural scale. Silver and pewter surfaces catch the light in brief sparks, producing an optical tremor that animates the paintings only as the viewer moves, as if the forest survives solely in its after-image.

Set before this vertical expanse, Olivia Fero’s three ceramic knots rest on white plinths. Each is formed from a single continuous strand of clay, looping back on itself in a closed, self-contained gesture. Crackled ivory glaze maps the surface like dried sediment, while irregular passages of black read as camouflage, staining, or rot. These compact forms appear as fruit fallen from Urbanek’s forest: mineralised, sealed, and inert.

Together, the works construct a stark memento that carries the energies of both water and fire. Water, once a generative force in the paintings’ making, appears evacuated from their imagery, while clay—traditionally pliant—has been fired into permanence. Liquidity becomes char; growth resolves into residue. The viewer stands between monument and relic.

The title, Long Life, Health, Virtue, Wealth and Easy Death, borrows the cadence of a folk blessing but delivers its promise in reverse. What remains is not consolation but aftermath: a clearing in which abstraction bears witness to change, endurance, and the stillness of both landscape and body.