At Ferrin Contemporary, cloud-like porcelain sculptures take shape in Kadri Pärnamets’ ‘Muraka’

By Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle, September 18, 2025

CUMMINGTON — Porcelain curves, twists and grows, taking on unexpected billowy forms in Kadri Pärnamets’ new exhibition, “Muraka,” in Ferrin Contemporary’s summer gallery at Project Art.

“I find that most of my work is inspired by water lately,” Pärnamets, just back from a summer trip to her native Estonia, said in a recent interview at the gallery.

That inspiration comes from walks along the Westfield River, which flows behind Project Art, and in Estonia, as well as from the ocean during a residency at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark, where she created a 7-foot-tall fire sculpture for Claytopia in July 2024.

The show, which opens with a short talk and public reception, 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 20, as part of Project Art’s open house during the Cummington Cultural District’s RiverFest, runs through Nov. 15. Pärnamets and her husband, Sergi Isupov, both resident artists of Project Art, will also be hosting RAKU firing, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., on the banks of the Westfield River, as part of the community-wide celebration.

“Muraka,” named for an Estonian nature reserve filled with wetlands and forests, builds upon two previous bodies of work, “Choreography of Water,” a 2022 solo show at Ferrin Contemporary’s former North Adams gallery featuring a sea of hand-built porcelain cups, vases and cloud forms, and her 2024 works, “Fragments of Waves,” a series documenting the rise and fall of ocean waves made from layers of colored clay in a luscious variety of blues and green hues.

“The sea just surrounded me, and there were all these waves out there. I was looking for all these different ways to express my idea about all this rushing water. Whenever you look at it, it’s different,” Pärnamets said of her creation of “Fragments of Waves,” which is also on view at the gallery. “I was just thinking, what’s the meaning for me? What’s the meaning for most people?”

Building on that work, Pärnamets began sculpting a series of works — small bulbous sculptures in bright hues that are reminiscent of the cloudberries that grow in the bogs of Muraka, the nature reserve close to her home in Estonia. These works informed two large-scale works in the show, created with the assistance of an Artists Resource Trust (A.R.T.) Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.

“Nature is a big inspiration,” Pärnamets said. “They start from this kind of cloud feeling. It’s something that you can’t touch, but it is there. You can see it. You can feel it, but you can’t really touch it.”

That feeling, she said, is what informs her work, allows her to shape soft, billowy, cloud-like structures from clay.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “It’s just this form that’s inspiring to me. I call it a softness and a movement. When you look at them, you can see this softness, this movement … like they’re floating a little bit.”

More on the Exhibition HERE

More on Kadri Pärnamets HERE