Marianne Eggimann

Marianne Eggimann

Born in 1980, Sumiswald, Switzerland

1999-2003 School of Design, ceramic section, Bern, Switzerland

1998-1999 School of Design, Basel, Switzerland

1997-1998 Berufs, Fach, Fortbildunsschule, Bern, Switzerland

2007 Winner of the Frechen, Ceramic Competition, Forum of contemporary ceramics, Halle, Germany

2007 Young ceramist prize, 55th International biennal of ceramics, Faenza, Italy

2006 Frechen Ceramic Competition, Ceramic Magazine Europ, Frechen, Germany

2006 1st Prize, Young European Ceramic Competition, St-Quentin-la-Poterie, France

2003 Link-Preis, ceramic section, School of Design, Bern, Switzerland

Marianne Eggimann produces small objects in ceramics. She also uses glass to create a mix of materials that is often a problem for other artists.

She justifies this by setting it in a genealogy that goes back to the souvenir snow globes that, as children, we would turn over again and again, fascinated by this snow-covered, motionless world, deadly dull but fascinating. She does, indeed often speak to us of death. She makes objects that resemble curios for rather strange old ladies who are, shall we say, “arsenic and old lace”, for slightly deranged collectors and entomologists, and lovers of incongruity and morbid eccentricity. These objects are easily understood, sometimes amusing, and often sinister and quirky. Triviality is king, with a devastating humour that is sensitive and tender but always incisive. The little world of childhood souvenir snow globes freezes over and turns to ice, and rightly so. There are so many “unnatural” crimes, or rather, crimes “against nature”.

Beneath a glass dome or in the – de facto – circumscribed space of the display object, the trinket, there is a world, a story to tell or imagine, in which man does not have the best role and in which nature suffers at almost every turn. There’s no room for innocence in all that. We are all, beneath our glass dome, in our little world, an object in the hands of others, a criminal or a potential victim, an object that needs to be preserved and protected, just like nature and the beings that live in it.

Yves Peltier