Linnis van Kampen

WithIn the Spray Gun is a workshop installation centered around the spray gun as a craft tool. The installation brings together a spray table, ceramic tiles and video to make visible a process of learning through material, tool and hand. Rather than presenting the tiles as fixed or finished outcomes, the work shows them as traces of testing, adjustment and response.

The spray gun is usually understood as an industrial tool: efficient, repeatable and made for controlled application. In this project, I approach it differently. I use the spray gun as a way to build a more sensitive relationship with ceramic glaze. Through repeated spray tests, I explored how pressure, distance, movement, layering and the use of stencils influence the surface of the tile. Each tile records a moment within this learning process. Some results show control, while others reveal softer edges, uneven transitions, color shifts or unexpected material behavior.

The work questions the separation between craft and industry. Craft is often associated with the hand, tradition and slowness, while industrial production is connected to speed, standardization and efficiency. My project does not reject industry, but asks how an industrial tool can become part of a craft practice when it is used with attention and responsiveness. The spray gun creates distance between the body and the surface, yet it still requires sensitivity. The maker has to read the material while working: how the glaze moves, how it builds up, how it passes through the stencil and how small changes in gesture affect the final surface.

I use neo-craft to describe this position: a post-industrial craft practice that does not return to traditional craft as something pure or nostalgic, but uses contemporary and industrial tools as part of material learning. In this context, the tool is not only used to produce a result, but becomes part of a process of understanding material behavior. 

WithIn the Spray Gun invites the viewer to read the tiles not only as ceramic surfaces, but as records of decisions, movements and material responses. In this way, making becomes a form of thinking through doing.