Porcelain sculptures, with their delicate beauty and fragile elegance, have long been a medium for artists to explore profound themes like the sublime and the uncanny. The sublime, often associated with awe and overwhelming grandeur, finds expression in porcelain through intricate, large-scale works that challenge the material’s perceived fragility. Artists like Edmund de Waal and Ai Weiwei use porcelain to create installations that evoke a sense of infinity or transcendence, playing with light, scale, and repetition to immerse viewers in an almost spiritual experience.

On the other hand, the uncanny—a feeling of eerie familiarity or unsettling strangeness—emerges in porcelain sculptures through distorted forms, surreal juxtapositions, or hyper-realistic details. Artists such as Ronit Baranga and Kris Lemsalu manipulate porcelain’s smooth, lifelike quality to craft figures that blur the line between the animate and inanimate, provoking discomfort and curiosity. The material’s historical ties to luxury and domesticity further amplify these effects, as subverted teacups or fragmented bodies disrupt conventional associations.

By merging technical mastery with conceptual depth, porcelain artists invite viewers to confront the boundaries of beauty, fear, and wonder, making the medium a powerful tool for engaging with the sublime and the uncanny in contemporary art.