🎧 Etty Anderson: Craft, Queerness, and Subversion Lysanne Larose

Appears in the December 2024 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

For Etty Anderson, the past eighteen months have been transformative: they were among the Québec artists showing at the Salon Révélations during the Révélations International Biennial of Crafts and Creation in Paris in 2023; completed a two-month residency at Medalta in Medicine Hat, Alberta; won the Jury’s Selection (Prototypes) of the 2024 Toronto Interior Design Show for their conceptual furniture and vessels; and received the award for best storage vessel in Companion Gallery’s “Last Call IX” show.

A former fashion designer, Etty Anderson (they/them) is the powerhouse behind the YYY collection of ceramics, as well as a published cookbook author and the Vegan Secret Supper Club’s chef. Anderson is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist who has opened, curated, and directed an artist-run space, as well as being active as a jewelry maker, illustrator, photographer, and musician. Their nomadic Supper Club has popped up in Vancouver, Brooklyn, and Montréal. Their tightly designed porcelain pieces—lidded jars, footed goblets, pendant lamps, and stools—blend colorful nerikomi and neriage inlay with angular lines and rounded profiles. 

While their work may bring to mind the short-lived but iconic Memphis Group, founded by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass in the early 80s, Anderson’s influences spring from more contemporary furniture design and architecture. It’s all about shape and color, Anderson explains. “I work in a very tight, precise way. And while I may want to make things that look messier, my sense of aesthetic is so strong that I struggle to break away from it.”

A Biennale in Paris

For their Paris show, Anderson deliberately pushed that sharp, bright aesthetic into an uneasy experience. They threw and hand-built a banquet of domestic objects, some of which masqueraded as carpets and an ottoman. Adorned with nerikomi inlays of queer pop imagery and occult symbols, the sculpture installation was a way to ask the audience why some signifiers of class and wealth are used frequently (a plush footrest, soiled from use) while others aren’t used at all (a precious rug, never trod upon)? The unusable carpets of ombré porcelain chain mail and the unyielding ottoman aimed to create a sense of disquiet in the viewer.

Anderson explains that they meditate on how the wealthy would historically display expensive furnishing in their homes without knowing anything about the craftspersons who’d made them, yet would know the artists included in their fine-art collection. 

“Art always has its class aspects,” says Anderson. “I’ve thought a lot about class and accessibility; about making things I can’t afford and that none of my friends can either.”

Anderson’s practice thus questions why art will be valued for the artist who made it, while crafts can be valued without acknowledging the craftsperson. This narrative of erasure extends to the wider sphere of queer people. Just as the contributions of craftspersons have often gone unrecognized, the lives and influences of queer individuals have often been obscured. Anderson draws a parallel between these two phenomena, weaving questions of craft, queerness, and class into a fragile, porcelain tapestry.

Queering the Space

The Révélations installation has launched Anderson into a more sculptural practice. While the Medalta residency has allowed them to try atmospheric firings, thus imposing a measure of uncertainty on their careful designs, more importantly, it has given them the space to wrestle further with these questions. 

“I feel like my Paris pieces were maquettes to start my exploration,” says Anderson. “For that ottoman, I asked myself, ‘What’s the most ridiculous piece of furniture I can make?’ I like how much skill goes into an ottoman and then someone will just casually rest their feet on it.”

Anderson focused on mimicking textiles for their installation: “There’s that notion of the permanence of ceramic and the impermanence of fabric. I like how this hard material can mimic something soft, something that you’d like to relax on—and it’s just not comfy.”

For their future projects, Anderson explains that they’ve been imagining spaces filled with objects that toy with dimensions and materials, along with the viewer’s experience. How comfortable or uncomfortable would the space feel? What would its queer aspects be? How comfortable would a person who is queer feel when entering that space, versus a person who isn’t? 

“Here is a space where you can’t relax: you can’t sit on the chair, you can’t recline on the rug, you can’t eat the food. A room where everything is beautiful but wrong. In this experience, the rug is oppressive. But is it comforting to a queer person?” muses Anderson.

“I’m a deep crafts person; I like the idea of pushing into the art world and creating this discomfort within the viewer,” they conclude. 

Queering Mud: A Watershed Moment

Anderson is a natural community organizer. In the past, they ran a community space/gallery, organized art collectives, and made pottery in an 18-person studio that included folks who did everything from metalsmithing to leatherwork. 

Anderson enjoys gathering people in an inclusive way for communal events, whether it’s for their Vegan Secret Supper Club or the Queering Mud thematic residency they hosted at Maine’s Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts this past summer. The residency was aimed at queer, trans, and femme people interested in working with color and pattern in clay. “I was excited to gather artists that I’ve talked with on Instagram for years, but never met,” says Anderson. “We finally got to work together, collaborate, and exchange ideas.” And with Anderson being who they are, the residency naturally ended with a celebratory meal served on the ceramics created by the participants. 

And it won’t end there: Anderson is returning to Medalta for a longer stay in 2025, where they plan to continue their explorations, though they explain their focus is turning toward queer roots and relics. “It’ll be more of a conversation with nostalgia and queerness. I’ll also be researching atmospheric firings, trying to create a colored porcelain clay body that reacts in the atmospheric kilns like a glaze. A way of queering clay, if you will,” concludes Anderson.

Discover Anderson’s work at www.yyycollection.com, or on Instagram: @e_tt_yyy and @vegansecretsupper.

the author Lysanne Larose, based in Montréal/Tiohtià:ka, Québec, Canada, makes large, semi-abstract ceramic sculptures and occasionally writes about fellow ceramic artists. Instagram: @LatelierLarose.