Baikal-CeraMystica

Dear Friends! We are pleased to present the results of the work of the 5th International Art Symposium Baikal-CeraMystica on the pages of this catalogue.
In 2016, once again, there was Baikal and mystery. Once again, we could feel the help of the Baikal Spirits during the whole project, and, of course, there was, is, and will be Ceramic Art.
Love of Ceramic Art is the thing that moves this project. The creation of ceramic objects is a complex, multifarious, captivating, vivacious, always inimitable, and in its own way mystic action. The team that organized and ran this project in 2016 include the following people: Sergei Purtyan, Tatiana Eroshenko, and Elena Nosova. We were helped, as always, by my mother, Lyudmila Eroshenko, our invaluable and irreplaceable coordinator Lidia Los, and due to circumstances and unexpectedly for us and for himself Dmitry Khokhlovkin.
Implementing the Baikal-CeraMystica project has become like an addiction. It is just plain impossible to imagine a life without this face-to-face communication with soul mates and guild brethren, without these insane and gruesome weeks of preparation and the two-week round-the-clock work in our white tents, without the joy of endless interaction and mutual exchange of experience, without the morning, daytime, and evening firing sessions, without songs in different languages and a series of the summary exhibitions, and finally, without the emptiness and the subsequent realization of how big your Ceramic Family has grown and how richer you have become.
Since 2013, Baikal-CeraMystica has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. In 2013-2015, we also got support from the Ministry of Culture and Archives of the Irkutsk Region. This project has already become a significant cultural event in the global ceramic community. The primary objectives of this project are to strengthen international cooperation, take Russian ceramics to the world stage, ensure Russia’s participation in the global artistic process, and develop and promote the art of ceramics, as well as educational objectives.
The project is developing, expanding in its geographic scope, and becoming more technologically equipped. On the creative platform of the project, we run educational projects for students of art universities and vocational colleges and hold the School of Ceramics for non-professional artists. This year, in addition to the already traditional for our project gas kilns and raku firings, we got, although small for now, high temperature kilns. Thanks to them, it is now possible to work with porcelain and stoneware. Some artists were able to create small figurines using porcelain or combine rough chamotte clay and fine porcelain in their work. We are thankful to our partners and sponsors for it.
This year, we introduced a category “Traditional Art” and invited Andrei Saltan, the ceramic artist from Tomsk, who works in this particular field of ceramic art. We thought that it was important to introduce our foreign guests to the Russian pottery traditions, and in fact, it was quite interesting for them.
This project was greatly enriched by the participation of not only professional artists in the field of ceramics, but also sculptors and painters from different countries who work with ceramics as well. It imposes a certain style on the work with materials and a different approach to the form, texture, and color, wider and better revealing the artistic qualities of the material, its plastic ways of expression.  The collection of our Foundation
now includes the art works that combine different materials - chamotte with rusty pieces of metal found on the Island, porcelain and stoneware with copper, black clay with bronze.
Ceramic art is a form of modern art with the widest possibilities. We are happy to introduce you to the world of ceramic art and the artists from different countries who live and create in it.
Among our future big plans is the establishment of the Museum of Modern Ceramics in Irkutsk District — the first museum of contemporary ceramics in Siberia, which will become not just a museum, but an international residence of ceramics and a workshop and interactive artistic platform for children and adults alike. Here, we also plan to work with children with special needs. We have already purchased a lot for the construction of the museum in the village of Bolshaya Rechka. Currently, our partner, the architect Elena Zhizhchenko is designing the layout of the future museum-residence of ceramics on a pro-bono basis. In order to build a world-class Museum of Ceramics in Irkutsk District, we are looking for philanthropists who want to leave a lasting, significant, and important imprint on the history of development of the Baikal region, Siberia, and Russia.

Tatiana Eroshenko, Ceramic Artist, Author and Artistic Director of the Project