Ioana Tămaş
Emotional Metamorphosis. Article on Ioana Tămaş, published in the international ceramics magazine Neue Keramik – New Ceramics in September/October 2025.
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Emotional Metamorphosis
Making sense of the world in which we live and our own place in it is challenging enough at the best of times, but perhaps even more so in these days of social polarisation and geopolitical turmoil. For many, finding meaning and coherence in an environment full of conflict, uncertainty and repressive attitudes can lead to a sense of confusion, anxiety and even cognitive dissonance, especially for the younger generations. For artists like Ioana Tămaş, such themes are used as subject matter to form a narrative with the outside world, often through a process of self-inquiry and personal experience. As such, she belongs to a new cohort of ceramicists who have found their voice by breaking the mould and engaging with their audience through symbolism, metaphor and especially storytelling.
In her own words, Ioana is fascinated by human psychology and the forces that shape our personal identity. It is why much of her work is the result of considerable soul-searching and self-reflection. Her journey started in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where she grew up as a quiet, introverted child, obsessed with drawing as a way of expressing herself. She attended the local art college where she fell in love with ceramics and discovered a new sense of creative freedom. She graduated college after winning first prize in a national competition for plastic art, design and architecture, which also enabled her to continue her education at the Universitatea de Artă și Design, where she received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ceramics. Here, there was a strong emphasis on the “why” and the “story” in the creative process and this would serve as an excellent foundation for her own artistic development. What intrigues her most is the relationship she has with the clay as an enabler for documenting experiences and emotions through the medium of form, texture and pigmentation in a dialogue with her audience.
Much of Ioana’s work is the product of a thematic approach, which enables her to explore her subject matter in more depth, even when it may seem contradictory or ambivalent. She does not shy away from probing the duality or juxtaposition of certain emotions, such as fear and confidence, vulnerability and strength, fragility and potency, pain and pleasure: concepts that can often coexist side by side. This adds a degree of complexity, but also better reflects the human experience. It is also why she enjoys experimenting with other materials, be it textiles, paper, video or performance to reinforce her message. She would much prefer that her work evokes a response in the viewer. Not necessarily a predictive response, but one that initiates engagement and discourse in the form of a more participatory process. Such shared experiences make her work readily accessible. By telling her story she hopes that people will be able to understand her work better.
Several years ago, for example, she had the opportunity to work on a project concerning the transgender and transvestite community in her adopted home city of Eindhoven. It was then that she started to focus on the subject of identity as a recurring theme in her work. The project was called Who Am I?, which explored identity from the perspective of attitudes towards gender specificity,
androgyny, the feeling of entrapment and the struggle for acceptance. Later, she would turn this central theme on herself. The project Horns was used as a mirror to reflect on her own identity and her own experiences as an immigrant, together with the sense of estrangement and alienation, especially in relation to expectations, perception, cultural differences and a fear of being misunderstood. Also from an artistic perspective. It is a powerful and honest investigation into detachment and isolation, as well as determination, fortitude and resolve, necessary to break through barriers. Similar issues were also explored in The Stories Untold, a project that was presented at the Biennale de la Ceramique in Andenne in 2015 and which won the Jury Award. These raku-fired works incorporate lithographic printing, a technique she first discovered during an internship in Turkey and which she would go on to develop and utilise in other work. As the name suggests, the focus of this project was the subject of hidden narratives and the fact that, although we all have a story to tell, in the majority of cases these stories remain silent, unvoiced and internalised. Ultimately, as with much of Ioana’s work, it is a portrayal of what lies obscured beneath the surface and a plea to look deeper and not take everything at face value. A way of finding meaning by embracing difference and diversity.
Ioana Tămaş, however, has also learned that identity is not only a place of confrontation, but also one of self-reflection and comfort. The Ceramics Theatre is an imaginary world of dream and surrealism inspired by her own experiences on the road to self-discovery and coming to terms with changing environments. For the artist, the theatre is the perfect stage for analysing and showcasing the complexities of individual characters and emotions. This project has therefore become a continuously evolving medium. Spoken Through My Fingers, for example, is played out by a miscellany of ceramic hand-puppet characters, creating various theatrical scenes to relate their different stories. The puppeteer in this case is the artist herself. The characters of Children of the Theatre depict various perspectives of the same hybrid baby doll puppet. Here, the “perfect” image of a baby doll has been distorted and the concept of beauty is shown in a different light. And finally Strings is a scenario inhabited by an assortment of marionette characters, either held by strings to symbolise control and manipulation, or obscured by masks and heads to indicate confusion and hidden intensions. The performance is accompanied by a self-made composition of reverberating sounds and music that adds an additional layer of gravity to the set. As such, the whole series abandons the use of conventional dramatic forms in order to portray an allegory of often opposing sentiments, intimate feelings and fantasy. It is a cabinet of curiosities used to gain access to the intricacies of the artist’s persona. Yet it is completely relatable and free of dogma. It is storytelling through theatrical sculptural imagery and metamorphic symbolism.
Importantly, Ioana Tămaş may have chosen ceramics as her preferred medium to chronicle her narrative, but she employs a host of stylistic devices such as symbolism, magic realism, metaphor and pathos to do so. Her sculptures are hand-built and she uses pigments to accentuate the desired effect rather than glazes which could obscure it. Besides being fascinated by African and Pre-Columbian indigenous art, she continues to draw inspiration from the world around her: the natural environment, the people she encounters and events in her life. And these influences are reflected in her more recent work. It is a world populated by anomalous biomorphic organisms and hybrid therianthropic figures: bold transmuted forms, part animal, part human, yet entirely identifiable. This is because, as with all mythological invocations, they remain completely anthropomorphic in their message. But there is also no false modesty or sentimentality here. These creations are compelling and call out for attention, literally and figuratively. Essentially, they encapsulate various states of body and mind as a way of confronting an ever-changing world, experiences and uncertainty through a process of what the artist aptly calls a metamorphosis of emotions.
Neale Williams
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Ioana Tămaş was born in Cluj-Napoca, in north-western Romania, in 1988. She attended the local art college to study ceramics before continuing her education at the Universitatea de Artă și Design, where she received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ceramics. After graduating from university, Ioana moved to Eindhoven in the Netherlands and opened her own studio, where she continues to develop her own unique style. Ioana Tămaş has exhibited her work at various locations, most recently at Gallery Terra in Delft, and has won juried prizes in Romania, Belgium and the Netherlands.