Aya Simone Baekhoej Schmidt

Tactile large scale ceramic piece in blue and white. Colours flowing together. Anthropomorphic figure.

Aya Simone Baekhoej Schmidt (1995), from Denmark, is a ceramic artist and sculptor currently based in London. She completed her BA from the Royal Danish Academy in Denmark in 2020 and is graduating with an MA in Ceramics from the Royal College of Art in 2023.

Aya has exhibited at A. Petersen in Copenhagen, Bornholm Art Museum, and the exhibition ‘Clay’, in Denmark during 2020. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Officine Saffi Award4 and was at MIART, in Milan, Italy. In the same year she was an artist in residence at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Centre, Skælskør, Denmark.

My work is driven by a fascination with the material qualities of ceramics and how these can be used to tell stories and evoke curiosity.

It explores relations, in whatever shape they may take. Object to object, human to object, human to human. I am fascinated by how they affect and shape us.

For this body of work, I have worked with grief and loss, more specifically the loss of the physical form.

Through hand-building abstracted figurative forms I have sought to make a series of sculptures that can create a moment of reflection. Very gestural textured surfaces invite touch. The silkiness of the glaze becomes reminiscent of skin or marble, creating a setting for haptic remembrance.