Jana Francke is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary designer and artist.

Key to her aesthetic is the embodiment and physical reality of being alive, expressed in her ceramic works that are created entirely by hand.

Her reverence of flesh as the sanctuary of life, mind and spirit clashes with traditional concepts of aesthetics or functionality. ‘Normality’, ‘correctness’ or ‘propriety’ give way to a shameless celebration of the animated, ambiguous, warped, grotesque, viscous and amorphous. She works the experience of being alive into alluring and seductive objects. 

Francke and Zezegmaa show works that investigate the ancient device of the vessel: The human critter might be the weakest in nature: a naked, weird and beautiful thing of flesh and awkward patches of hair. Draped in textiles, living in concrete boxes, the vessels of material that keep us safe and nourished, and the vessels of culture that carry thoughts of long-dead figures, stories and histories, all contribute to the making of our ‘humanity.’ Zezegmaa and Francke share an obsession with vessels both in the spiritual, semantic, metaphorical, aesthetic as well as functional and worldly sense. However, there is a pronounced tension between their artistic practice and the Idea of containment, being contained in the sense of restriction. They blur borders, mix languages, amalgamate schools of thought and cultures. Their work is defined by experimental approaches and the questioning of boundaries, and extremely meticulous minds and hands.