Little Hybrids – Gitte Jungersen

Work series, 2015 – 2018

The playful and humorous meet erosion in an expression that is simultaneously light-hearted and catastrophically ruinous.

The series queries the identity of the material, pointing to its very nature as ceramics: fired materials from the earth’s crust. Simultaneously, the textures and colours reveal the strictly synthetic, man-made origin. The glazes, because of their consistency and colours, give rise to dual associations: As a raw, chaotic natural force, but also artificial in their colours and consistency – like an “edible” substance that is delicious like sweets but also almost like an alien, overwhelming mass that takes over the form. The firing process has a dual impact: creation and destruction at once. The objects are the outcome of a process that fluctuates between gaining control through systematic testing, and surrendering to the random occurrences in the kiln firing. Each object consists of multiple layers of different glazes that melt and fuse over a clay structure; as the mass cools, it freezes in time, right on the edge between chaos and control, like a single snapshot from the process.