Anemoon On Fire
Anemoon On Fire (Anemoon Fokkinga, b. 2003) is a Dutch self-taught ceramic artist working primarily in porcelain. She began working with clay at the age of fifteen during a period in which health challenges prevented her from attending school, and has developed her practice independently through experimentation, research, and studio work.
After discovering ceramics in various studios between 2019 and 2021, Anemoon established her own studio, Anemoon On Fire, in 2020. The studio continues to serve as the center of her artistic practice, providing a space for experimentation with hand-built porcelain, colored clay, engobes, glazes, and surface techniques. Since her first exhibitions at the age of seventeen, Anemoon has built a rapidly growing exhibition record in the Netherlands and abroad. Her work has been presented at Art Rotterdam, Dutch Design Week, Prospects (Mondriaan Fund), the International Ceramic Art Fair in Jingdezhen, and numerous gallery and museum exhibitions focused on contemporary ceramics and emerging talent.
In 2022, she received a Kunstenaar Start grant from the Mondriaan Fund and support from the Cultuurfonds. International residencies have played an increasingly important role in Fokkinga’s development, including period at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida (2022–2023), a workshop at the Morean Workshop Center in St. Petersburg, Florida (2025), and residencies at Yiji Studio in Jingdezhen, China (2025 and 2026–2027).
A major milestone in Fokkinga’s career came in 2023, when curator Dr. Wendy Gers invited her to create a large-scale installation for the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The resulting project, Animals Far From Now and Beyond, was exhibited as part of Oracles from Far & Near (2024–2025). The museum subsequently acquired seventeen sculptures from the installation for its permanent collection. Her recent exhibitions include Evident Talent at Galerie Terra, in Delft, the Netherlands; the anniversary exhibition 16Up at 38CC, PROSPECTS in Rotterdam; the International Ceramic Art Fair in Jingdezhen, China; and the 2025 edition of the Dutch National Ceramics Prize De Kei. Inspired by extensive time spent in nature and by her experiences as a scuba diver, Anemoon On Fire continues to expand her technical and conceptual practice through new materials, processes, and international collaborations.
Visit Anemoon On Fire’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2022-2026
Anemoon On Fire creates ceramic sculptures that imagine how life might evolve in a future transformed by climate change and pollution. Fascinated by marine biology, deep-sea creatures, and speculative evolution, she invents new species that appear to have adapted to increasingly hostile environments. Her fictional organisms combine recognizable elements of existing animals with mutations driven by rising waters, plastic pollution, and other ecological disruptions.
Nature is both fascinating and concerning in her practice. Drawing partly on her experiences as a diver, Anemoon considers survival and adaptation as ongoing processes: some species disappear, others transform, and entirely new forms of life emerge. Personal experiences and inner anxieties also enter this imagined ecosystem, giving the creatures an emotional dimension as well as an environmental one.
Working primarily with porcelain, she builds highly detailed sculptures and develops their surfaces with engobes, oxides, pigments, and layered glaze combinations. The resulting works sit between scientific specimen and fantasy creature, proposing strange yet conceivable inhabitants of a world altered by human activity.
