"Captured Moment 'Swallow Dance' from the series Ice Princess" Sculpture

Austrian ceramic sculptor Brigitte Saugstad creates hand built stoneware sculptures inspired by movement, ornament and transformation. Her artistic language has been shaped by physical movement, the Viennese tradition of ceramics and Jugendstil, and extended periods spent in India. Rather than quoting these traditions directly, her work moves through them in search of a freer and more personal sculptural vocabulary. The circular forms recurring throughout her work are deeply connected to her early years in competitive figure skating — rotation, momentum, the trace of movement through space, freedom in movement. “Even then, moving on the ice, I already felt myself to be both an artist and an athlete. That physical memory of dynamism and weightlessness still lives in all of my sculptures today.” Working primarily with hand-built stoneware and experimental firing processes, including Raku firing, she creates organic forms balancing fullness and lightness, discipline and spontaneity. Surface, colour and texture emerge through an intuitive dialogue with material, gravity and fire. Her sculptures often evoke bodily memory, rhythm and emotional states without becoming illustrative. Her best-known works include Ganesha and Hanuman sculptures — hand-built in stoneware and developed as contemporary sculptural forms balancing ornament, movement and material presence rather than functioning as devotional objects. Brigitte Saugstad studied ceramic art and design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Prof. Matteo Thun and later continued her studies at the College of Art in New Delhi. Her works have been exhibited internationally in galleries, museums and art fairs across Europe, Asia and the United States, and are held in private collections worldwide. In 2025, her ceramic sculpture Acquisition of Joy received the Adolf-Peschek Audience Award at the 79th Annual Exhibition of the St. Pöltner Künstlerbund. Brigitte Saugstad lives and works in Vienna and Eichgraben, Lower Austria.