"PROSPERITY" Sculpture

Austrian ceramic sculptor Brigitte Saugstad creates hand-built stoneware sculptures about movement, ornament and transformation.

The circular forms in her work come from her early years as a competitive figure skater: rotation, momentum, the trace a body leaves in space.

“Even then, on the ice, I felt like both an artist and an athlete. When I model clay, what I feel and what comes into being are one and the same. I could never work like a sculptor carving stone or wood. There, form emerges through the removal of material, through resistance rather than movement. With clay, I can express what already exists within my body.”

Her artistic language was also shaped by the Viennese tradition of ceramics and Jugendstil, and by long stays in India. She does not quote these traditions. Her work moves through them toward a freer, more personal sculptural vocabulary.

She builds by hand in stoneware and works with experimental firings, including Raku. Her forms hold fullness and lightness, discipline and spontaneity. Surface, colour and texture emerge between her hands, gravity and fire.

Her best-known works are her Ganesha and Hanuman figures. They are not devotional objects but contemporary sculptures in which ornament, gesture and material meet.

Before turning to ceramics, she worked as a volunteer in the conservation department of the Belvedere in Vienna while studying art history. She went on to study Ceramics and Design under Prof. Matteo Thun at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, trained as a porcelain painter at the Vienna Porcelain Manufactory Augarten, and studied at the College of Art in New Delhi.

Her work has been shown in museums, galleries and art fairs across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America, including the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome. Selected works from her ViennaBLOOM Collection are on permanent display at the Österreichische Werkstätten in Vienna. Her work is held in private collections worldwide.

She lives and works in Vienna and Eichgraben, Lower Austria.