in short
Yvonne Lanz lives and works in Bern. Her works combinate ceramics, video, and poetry. Using clay and archaeological finds as her starting point, she explores deep time (the unimaginably long periods of Earth’s history), our perception, and human traces in the landscape. Inspired by her own footprints, which she left behind while hiking through the Toggenburg countryside, she created two large ceramic pieces and smaller objects using Lichtensteig clay she collected herself. Over the years, these will weather and crumble into dust.
work
Zwischen zwei Bergen fliesst ein Fluss (2026)
loosely translates as:
A river flows between two mountains
“Last fall, I moved between two mountains, roamed the forests, followed the course of the river, and dug in the ground for wild clay. A stream flows between these mountains, and I found clay on its banks. On a snowy day, I hiked up one of the mountains, my boots sinking deep into the snow. The next day, from the summit of the opposite mountain, I spotted the line I had traced across the landscape with my footsteps. In that moment, I looked back on my own past and realized once again how we leave traces in the landscape and shape it through our actions. At the same time, the forest and the region also shape us. We are intertwined and part of an ongoing process.” This is how Yvonne Lanz describes her time in Lichtensteig.
She translated her multifaceted impressions into two large ceramic pieces and several smaller objects made from local clay. The objects and an accompanying audio piece resemble diary entries; they tell their own stories and draw on memories. Over the next few years, the local clay will weather and crumble, much like the Neutoggenburg ruins, which stand on one of the two mountains and which Yvonne Gallo often visited. What remains in the end is dust that carries within it all the processes that came before.
artist
Yvonne Lanz
Yvonne Lanz (1984*) lives and works in Bern. Her works combine ceramics, video, and poetry, which engage in an ongoing dialogue with one another. Using clay and archaeological finds as her starting point, she explores deep time (the unimaginably long periods of Earth’s history), our perception, and human traces. She is interested in how materials store knowledge and how past life forms shape our actions today. She understands perception as an active process that can be practiced. Yvonne Lanz intervenes artistically in open spaces and deliberately uses gaps as a starting point for telling stories and shaping her sculptures.
web
Instagram: @hyvonn
This is a machine-translated text, reviewed by a human—for more accuracy, please read the original.