Interview · September 2026
Expanding time with small gestures
Craig Hartenberger’s primary inspiration is architecture: the patterns and materials of the built world. But, unlike in architecture, almost nothing he makes is monumental. His sculptures are handheld, warm, closer to a toy or a woven sample than to a facade.
Craig sat down at a potter’s wheel for the first time at twelve years old, almost 25 years ago. He was amazed by the responsiveness of the material and the unlimited possibilities that working with clay presented.
“No matter how much time or attention I gave the process, there was always more to learn, something different to make, a new challenge. I was hooked immediately.”
Daily gestures
Craig is fascinated by the concept of time. It exists in quantities we know and quantities we do not, and no amount of effort produces more of it. For him, how we spend ordinary time becomes incredibly important.
“Putting abundant care into the small, the daily, the intimate, is what I value.”
He describes himself as a gardener, a baker, a slow mover and a curious observer. He values activities that require patience, the things you cannot speed up or economise.
“Moving slowly and doing one thing, at the pace it takes, for as long as it takes is the greatest gift.”
His way of working follows the same principle. He describes his relationship with the material as a meditative one, and his practice as slow and deliberate, giving attention to each moment. Nobody can add hours to a day, but attention of that kind changes how time is experienced.
Pattern as a way of organising the mind
Craig describes his work as a practice in problem solving. He makes something when he cannot resolve it in his mind, and pattern is how he organises the thinking.
“I have always had an extremely active visual imagination and patterns hold the right amount of complexity and simplicity for me. I often find the most engaging works to be made from a few elements that are arranged to play off one another.”
Patterns also contain an endlessness he admires. You can iterate on a pattern over and over, even using the same elements or the same palette, and still find changes both subtle and large.
He traces this directly back to his beginnings on the wheel, where the same thing made him fall in love with the material: repeated gestures, patience and consistency over time, leading to new discoveries.
The Salemi residency
During his time in Salemi, Craig will explore small scale architectural interventions in the quiet or forgotten spaces around the old town.
The work will carry his own aesthetic while sourcing visual information from each space to inform the pattern design. As he puts it, the project extends his interests in architecture and pattern into an expression of care and tenderness towards the forgotten or overlooked.
In this way, elements of architecture are rendered repetitively and on an intimate scale. This act references a calm attention to the daily activities of life, taking a presence that monuments - grand but always destined to fall - cannot.