Monies hand-forms the wet clay, working continuously on a piece until completion. ‘It might take 30 minutes or five hours.’ The vessels ‘sleep’ while they air dry before being fired and glazed. ‘Then I choose the rope. It’s like dressing someone in clothes. And then the cork is cut and dyed as the last step, like a hat before leaving the house.’ His process begins intuitively.
He was living in Berlin when he started experimenting with stoneware. His girlfriend was pregnant and they had decided to return to Copenhagen after ten years of living abroad. ‘I’d lost mystudio and I ended up in a ceramic studio for the last few months in the city,’ he recalls. ‘I chose to work with the vessel as a universal object that many cultures throughout time have used. Stoneware is such a democratic medium, which is what spoke to me the most.
The circumstances of the past year have sharpened Monies’ focus. ‘2020 has forced me to be very selective in what I have in my existence. If it doesn’t work for me on a practical, conceptual and aesthetic level, it’s out,’ he says. Under Halloween’s full moon, Monies gathered up years’ worth of his early work and set it alight as a bonfire. ‘I needed to reset, tabula rasa – it was like the works of my past took up the space of my future works.
This is an extended version of an article that originally featured in the March 2021 issue of Wallpaper* , on newsstands now and