Hanna Miadzvedzeva is a visual artist specializing in ceramic sculpture. Originally from Belarus, she relocated to Poland for political reasons and now lives and works there. Hanna creates abstract ceramic sculptures that evoke meditative landscapes and emotional states, drawing on the rhythms of nature and her own experiences of solitude and reflection. Her work explores self-perception through form, where scale is intentionally ambiguous. She studied ceramics at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts, where she completed her bachelor’s, master’s, and graduate studies, and later taught for seven years in the Academy’s Ceramics Department.
Since 2019, she has actively participated in international symposia, exhibitions, and residencies, including the Guest Artist Residency at the Senter for Keramisk Kunst in Ringebu, Norway (2024); the Foundation Bruckner Residency in Carouge, Switzerland (2024); the European Ceramics Festival Terralha in Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, France (2024); and the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park Residency in Japan (2024), among others.
Miadzvedzeva has received several awards for her work, including First Prize at the 2024 European Ceramic Context (Bornholm, Denmark); the Dowstone Special Award at the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Art Biennale (China, 2023); the Gold Prize at the 1st Yatai Lotus Mountain Prize (Changchun, China, 2019), and a Residency Prize a the Officine Saffi Award 5, (Milano, Italy). Hanna’s artworks are held in several public collections, including the Guangdong Shiwan Ceramics Museum (China), the Mark Rothko Art Centre (Latvia), the Keramik Kunst Museum (Germany), or the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan).
Visit Hanna Miadzvedzeva’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2019-2024
I am a visual artist, but generally, I combine sculptural form and ceramic technology in my work. For me, abstract sculpture is a distinctive, unlike anything else, formal language that responds directly to our sensory perception. The theme of self-perception in the natural space runs through my creative pursuits.
Since childhood, I was used to having long walks in nature, and to this moment, these walks remain for me the best way to return to the dialogue with myself. Observing how nature lives according to its global laws, you can look at all your problems in a detached way, re-evaluating their importance. During these meditation sessions, I pay attention not only to the large spaces that open up to the eye but also to the smallest details. My sculptures are kind of meditative objects that capture my composite images of landscapes, but not representations of specific places. Moreover, in these objects it is difficult to tell what scale has been applied – whether it is a view of the roundness of forested land seen from an airplane window or a reference to the shape of a lichen-covered rock seen directly underfoot in the nearby forest.
The immediate technological part of the work is also in a sense, meditative, as in such complex production processes, which I choose, not only a meticulous approach to the object construction, composition and consistency of materials are important, but also a very fine-tuned state of mind, the ability to control my breath and mood. When creating a new piece, my mind enters a “creational trance”. Ceramics, which in itself is the embodiment of naturalness, feels to me the most alive and receptive material, capable of translating my experiences as no other material can do.
