Danmarks Nationalbank’s Appreciation Grant

December 2020. Danmarks Nationalbank Jubilee Foundation has awarded me the appreciation grant.

The foundation motivates the grant with the following words:
“Your starting point is very classic ceramic, intuitive and sensual, but then you shift gears, and squeeze your work into precisely conceived concepts, which are fresh and innovative for the work with the ceramic materials. You have more than pretty good control over how you stage and partially controls the chaos you seek. Because it will become chaos when you work with glazes in such huge amounts as you do. And of course it is part of the point that you can only to some degree control the chaos, and thus you let the glaze define the work. Your works are radical and ground breaking, and you let the vivid, and for ceramics unusual, primary colours dominate and draw the hardcore classic pottery up off the couch. Your works are experimental and one of the strengths of your work is that it always surprises the viewer, and goes new ways. You are constantly moving forward, towards something new, something different, something yet more extreme. Or completely silent. Who knows? The foundation hopes that with this grant you will have the opportunity to maintain both freedom, quality and enthusiasm for more exciting projects.”

 

 

Exhibition: Cabinet of Exquisite Bodies at Musée Ariana, Geneva

April 12 – September 8, 2019.

Cabinet of Exquisite Bodies
Group show at Musée Ariana, Geneva, Switzerland. The museum has one of the works from the series Place to be Lost in their collection, which is featured in this exhibition.

“Constructed along the lines of exquisite corpse compositions, this exhibition leads visitors through a series of encounters with contemporary creations. Paintings, videos, collages, textiles, drawings and sculptures make up this disparate collection of artistic mediums or practices, dating from the early 20th century to the present day “.

Musée Ariana
Avenue de la Paix 10
CH-1202 Genève

Crowd Pleaser – People Who Pot in MDR Gallery, London

February 18 – April 7, 2019.

Group show in MDR Gallery in London. Crowd Pleaser presents the work of a new generation of designers who are using ceramic as a medium for their own expression. Within the past few years there has been a rapid and dramatic shift in the perception of ceramic as a creative material and, subsequently, its place within contemporary design. Once the preserve of craftsmen and women, with value placed upon it relative to the level of skill and expertise with which it was processed, or alternatively; a useful everyday material for industrial mass-production, ceramic languished. But, today, makers are exploiting the potential of this most pliable material. At MDR Gallery we recognise that the fashion for inventive and extraordinary design-led studio ceramics has reached a crescendo. We chose to celebrate that and gather together a selection of some of the most experimental and extraordinary work in this area.

Featured work from: Victoria Andrew, Dimitri Bähler, Erika Emerén, Emily Stapleton Jefferis, Gitte Jungersen, Romain Kloeckner, Ian McIntyre, Studio Mieke Meijer, Studio Joachim-Morineau, Granby Workshop, Sara Söderberg, Floris Wubben.

MDR Gallery
111 Lower Stable Street
Coal Drops Yard
NC1 4AB
London

 

The book is here!

November 2018. Thank you to graphic designer Nete Banke from Imperiet, and to the writers Jorunn Veiteberg, Lars Dybdahl and Stephanie Serrano Sundby. And to photographer Dorte Krogh for the fantastic pictures!

The book can be purchased from selected bookstores at designmuseums, here in Copenhagen at Louisiana Museum store, or from diverse internet book stores.

 

Book coming very soon

October 2018. Arnoldsche Art Publishers will publish a book with my works from the past 20 years very soon. Graphic designer Nete Banke and I went to the printer Narayana Press, to go through all the colour adjustments. So exciting to see the final result!

 

Guest teacher at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design

October 2018.
This autumn I teach a course at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, MA programme Ceramic Design, together with my colleague Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl.  The students work with the rococo, and the history about how porcelain was introduced to european factory production. I gave a talk about Nordic Network for Contemporary Ceramics research trip to Meissen and Dresden, which resulted in the Zwinger und Ich exhibition.
We started out breaking up the porcelain clay into its basic components: Kaolin, silica, and feldspar.

Mindcraft18 at San Simpliciano


Mindcraft18, exhibition at San Simpliciano during Milan Designweek.
All is Flux #7 and All is Flux #8  (2018)
Photo: Julie Hering

Mindcraft18 was presented by the Danish Arts Foundation,
Curated by Ditte Hammerstrøm.

‘All is Flux’ is a radical experiment based on enlarging and highlighting the tactile properties of ceramic glaze as a manifestation of the constant state of flux that characterizes the entire physical world, even if some transformation processes are so slow as to appear imperceptible. The liquid glaze is transformed in the kiln, but the apparent permanence of its new, solid form is merely an illusion, a temporary stage. Like a tactile snapshot, the works can be seen as a single point in the lifespan of the objects – just as there was a time before their current state, there is an ‘after’. Over time, the objects will break down, dissolve and re-emerge as new physical manifestations.

The objects in the series consist entirely of thick layers of different glazes that are poured into sharply defined rectangles and kiln-fired at 1280 degrees Celsius. In the kiln the glaze melts, boils and bubbles up, the process transforming the texture and appearance of the material and blurring the edges of the rectangular shape. A sudden reduction in the temperature freezes the chemical reaction. The complex and ambiguous textures can be seen both as primordial matter and as a manmade material in the process of melting and transformation.

 

 

All is Flux #7 and All is Flux #8
198 x 98 x 5 cm. 195 x 95 x 5 cm. Several layers of different glazes.
Easels: black stained wood.
Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

 

Detail (2018)
Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

Detail, All is Flux #8
Photo: Anders Sune Berg.