There are two kinds of architects. The first kind own black turtlenecks and speak confidently about light, describing buildings as “gestures” and “conversations.” The second kind are like Robert Davidov. Rob is a close friend and one of the most talented people I know. He is deeply suspicious of sentimentality—ask him about memory and he’ll answer with a discussion around structural tension, ask him about time and he’ll tell you about clay. Which is perhaps why these works are so moving.
For years, while quietly building an architectural practice of remarkable precision, Davidov has maintained a parallel ceramic practice: another way of thinking through balance, weight, permanence and collapse. The works in Small Acts of Permanence feel ancient and contemporary at once—part ruin, part monument—and refuse to perform. They don’t shout, decorate, or particularly care whether you understand them. They are evidence of a long conversation between a maker and a material that is constantly threatening to do its own thing. The interview that follows is, in many ways, an extension of that conversation.
Robert Davidov’s debut sculptural art practice Small Acts of Permanance, exhibiting at Oigåll Projects in July.
Your work often feels like it exists somewhere between tenderness and collapse. Do you think you trust objects more when they look like they’ve survived something?
Robert Davidov: What interests me about these works is less about survival and more about tension. Many of the pieces begin with simple spatial dynamics such as a wall, a plane, an arch, or a slab leaning against another form. It is intriguing to observe how much emotional or physical tension is created through relatively minimal assemblies—whether elements are stacked, interlocked, balanced, or resting against one another, the work is often trying to hold a moment of instability without fully collapsing.
There’s often a quiet negotiation happening between the forms—they simultaneously depend on and resist one another, and this juxtaposed relationship is quite central to the work.
Your work resists the hyper-polished feeling that dominates your architecture practice. Do you think the roughness carries more honesty?
Robert Davidov: I see them as two sides of the same coin; in many ways there is greater commonality between my sculptural practice and architecture than elements which separate them. Both are fundamentally concerned with space, proportion, balance, and framing.
The sculptures became another vehicle for exploring those ideas, but without the functional constraints that architecture carries. Being so distinct from architecture, they allow me to explore similar questions in a more direct way. There is also something important in both practices about respect for materials and process. Good architecture emerges from understanding the nature of materials rather than imposing ideas onto them and ceramics operates in much the same way. Clay has limits—it remembers pressure, records handling and resists being overworked. There is a point where the pursuit of perfection becomes counterproductive.
Ultimately, I don’t necessarily think roughness is more honest than refinement. I’m curious about what happens when the material is allowed to retain evidence of its own character and the process that shaped it.
What’s the difference between making something that is technically successful, and making something that you actually like?
Robert Davidov: When it comes to ceramics, technical success is never guaranteed. The process is fraught and experimentation, inexperience, or simply pushing the material too far can mean the difference between a finished work and one that doesn’t make it through the first firing. If you’re asking clay to do things it doesn’t naturally want to do, then a certain level of technique becomes unavoidable.
Once you’re past that threshold, though, a different set of questions emerge. You can start thinking about proportion, scale, composition, balance, and all the more subtle qualities that give a work its presence. Like any craft or discipline, the deeper you go, the more possibilities and challenges reveal themselves. Whether I actually like a piece once it’s finished is another matter entirely. A technically successful work can still feel unresolved, while a piece that has warped, cracked, cupped, or developed some unexpected flaw can suddenly become far more interesting. Over time I’ve learned that those outcomes aren’t necessarily failures. They’re part of the conversation with the material. Ceramics has taught me to find comfort in uncertainty—to work with it rather than against it. The things I might once have tried to eliminate are now often part of how the work finds its character and expression.
What would failure look like to you now, not professionally, but spiritually, as a maker?
Robert Davidov: We often talk about architecture having a spiritual dimension; in the sense of a space’s capacity to emotionally move us, calm us, frame our experience of the world, or connect us to something larger than ourselves. Ceramics can operate in a similar way. There is something meditative in the process of making, and hopefully some trace of that is carried forward into the finished work. But I don’t really think about failure in a spiritual sense.
For me, the important thing is the impulse to make. Sometimes that means approaching the clay with a clear intention, and sometimes it means simply exploring, playing, or following an idea without knowing where it will lead. If that process is genuine, then I’m not sure success or failure are the right measures. If the desire to make disappeared altogether, perhaps that would be something worth reflecting on, but even then, I wouldn’t describe it as failure. The drive to create isn’t an achievement in itself. It’s more like a calling that you either choose to follow or you don’t.
What I have come to believe is that creative pursuits need to satisfy something within you first. Whether it’s architecture, ceramics, writing, or anything else, the work has to sustain its own meaning. External recognition can be gratifying, but it isn’t enough to carry you through the years of uncertainty, repetition, and effort.
Do you think objects can carry emotional residue? Not metaphorically—literally. Like evidence of the state you were in when they were made.
Robert Davidov: I’ve never been particularly interested in the idea that materials possess some hidden consciousness, but I do believe they record their making. Clay remembers how it was treated. It records pressure, touch, restraint, force, heat, and time.
Ceramics is particularly revealing in this regard. Every piece undergoes two firings, each placing the object, its connections, folds, edges, and surfaces under immense thermal and physical stress. What emerges from the kiln is not simply the form you intended, but a record of how successfully the material absorbed and responded to those forces. In that sense, every object carries traces of the attention that created it. Whether that’s emotional residue or not, I’m not sure. But I do think making leaves a trace.
There’s something deeply optimistic about continuing to make physical objects in a world that increasingly values speed, image, and immediacy.
Robert Davidov: I’m not sure I’d describe it as either optimistic or pessimistic. For me, making physical objects is personal. It’s a way to work directly with a material and engage in a physical act of creation, rather than through the more mediated processes that architecture increasingly requires. So much of architectural practice today exists through screens, drawings, coordination, and layers of abstraction. Ceramics offers something much more immediate.
A lot of my work is interested in permanence, memory, and a kind of primitive familiarity. The feeling that certain forms, materials, and spaces resonate with us because they connect to something intrinsic to the human experience.
Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to these sculptural works. They have a certain naivety and tactility. They aren’t trying to be seamless, frictionless, or highly refined. In many ways they are an escape from the refinement of the contemporary world and a return to something more elemental.
Small Acts of Permanence will exhibit from 02 July – 19 July at Oigåll Projects, 122 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy.
Architect Robert Davidov