Triennale 2007 - Ceramics and Glass
The Triennial is here again, this time with a focus on contemporary craft in the categories of ceramics and glass. These two material groups undeniably have some common features; in their fragility, plasticity and weight, but they also have diametrically opposed qualities. The density of ceramics is contrasted to the transparency of glass, and the materials have their own traditions and history.
This is the fifth time the Norwegian Association of Arts and Crafts arranges this type of material-based triennial as a continuation of the annual exhibitions. The exhibition is based on open entry and is evaluated in two stages. The jury has had free reign in defining what falls within the framework of the exhibition. This year the jury has focused on a unified exhibition result. One of the considerations has been a desire for the works to touch and communicate with the viewer, rather than creating an exhibition that first and foremost reflects the extent of the diversity of artworks. As always in juried exhibitions, the artistic level of the exhibition is based on the material that is sent in; the impression is concentrated yet simultaneously reveals the complex situation for Norwegian crafts today. The majority of the entered works are ceramics, which can be said to reflect the actual distribution of craft practices nationwide. That an education in glass-making is still lacking in this country is a fact that is hard to overlook in this context. An expectation that the works in the exhibition should preferably challenge the concept of craft – a phrase that pops up at regular intervals – appears to be implicit in the concept of the triennial. But how is this imagined re-definition played out in practice? Many parallel tendencies claim our attention, with varying levels of insistence.
Entertainment and Tradition
Many will be sure to notice that this year’s exhibition has a so-called young profile, among other things due to the inclusion of several student works. It might appear that the Triennial has increasingly become an arena for totally new names. Jim Darbu’s frontispiece Hungry for Life emphasises a rather devil-may-care attitude, strongly influenced by the myriad characters of popular culture. Representative of many of the younger participants, Darbu lists entertainment, film and animation films as sources of inspiration without batting an eye. These isolated elements from a comic strip aesthetic are linked to an interest in the body as figure, and to the intuitive and potential absurdity of existence in the world. A parallel tendency can be found in the new use of traditional techniques. A fragile, delicate precision characterises Stine Walderhaug’s origami works in porcelain, where she devotes herself to a miniature format. The exhibited figures in folded paper applied with silk screened prints are 7x7 cm large and 1mm thick. The beauty of these objects is impossible to overlook and Walderhaug appears to have a very conscious relationship to origami and porcelain as phenomena that stem from Asia. The intricacy represented by these works is also characteristic of Lene Lunde’s Matryoshkas made of glass, which have considerable aesthetic appeal. At the same time, the work reflects an ancient Russian folk art tradition, here combined with the Norwegian painting tradition rosemaling. The work treats the subjects of reproduction and the passing of generations. Craft tradition as an integrated element is also found in Ida Løchen’s black chandelier – which stretches the properties of glass to their limit. Løchen explores to what degree the glass is capable of holding itself together and she exploits the glass material’s unique and conflicting properties; transparency, fragility and solidity.
Anatomy and System
Amoebas and seemingly running and disagreeable masses of material characterise a large part of the exhibition’s works and testify that an exploration of anatomy does not seem to have gone out of fashion. Nina Nordli’s soft shapes in ceramics exemplify a recurring trend among younger ceramic artists who actively seek traditional techniques; in this case a crystal glaze that was widespread in Art Nouveau. But these works leave recognizable organisms behind and threaten to become monstrosities like Kristin Rasmussen’s dotted candlesticks. The unpredictability of the organic process is in contrast to the production of things in more clinical systems, where the processes are characterised by a strict control. Cathrine Køster Holst has named a method she has invented after herself and operates within a clear framework comprised of specific systems and practices where she often relates to concrete numbers, weight and intervals of time. Lars Kristian Røed’s point of departure in his application of industrially produced bathroom tiles and rubber bands – 1000 tiles and 3000 rubber bands, to be exact – is also based on modules. The stable form, weight and hardness of the tiles work against the elasticity of the rubber bands in a technique where the rubber bands are woven around every other tile. The repetitive technique appears simple and easy, but the result is not without poetry.
Figuration and Narrative
A figurative narrative tone runs throughout the exhibition and Dag Bratbergsengen is behind one of the more unique varieties. His piece Confusion radiates an indefinable disquiet; a head shaped like a ball that can roll off on its own embodies a more abstract collective confusion. At the other end of the narrative scale is Anne Helen Mydland’s piece Forwards – Backwards – Now, that in a more humane and empathetic way occupies itself with the many layers of history, among other things through the use of photography. Mydland is preoccupied with the subject as a bearer of stories and history as identity-making. She combines several techniques based on sculptural traditions with ease, which here consciously take a side glance at common knick-knacks and figurines. Ceramics thus becomes a vehicle for social-cultural activity. The expressive potential of crafts is perhaps most clearly expressed in Jorunn Ohnstad’s hurriedly and playfully modelled clay couple, Vi 2, that somewhat reluctantly and clumsily comprise a whole. She has sought to capture an immediate and sketch-like fusion of form and emotion that can grab the viewer and provoke a range of reactions; from sympathy to mild amazement at the funny objects.
The works for hanging on walls contribute another type of narrative to the exhibition, which can appear to be more schematic and removed. Ceramic works in two-dimensional visual form, especially on tiles, have a long tradition that is continuously being developed – often with fluid boundaries merging with painting, graphic art or drawing. Here the clay is no longer treated as a plastic material, but rather used to create exceedingly durable pictorial compositions. Christina Peel’s architectonic and urban landscape based on photography and transferred to the surface of the clay by airbrush is static and controlled and executed with great graphic skill. The refusal to play along with the dictate that clay is chiefly a plastic material is treated with refined humour by Gunn Tjensvold in her piece, A tribute to all the songs that I just can’t get out of my mind, itself a tribute to music as a backdrop to everyday life. The dialogue between two wonderbaums is very unpretentious. The flat character of the material used is also found in Cecilie Mossige’s figures that resemble a cut-out doll, and in Marlene Lindmark’s Road Kills, which in a slapstick form refers to animals killed by cars. Mass consumption on a collision course with nature can be seen as a unifying theme.
From Everyday Aesthetics to the Extraordinary
The intimate sphere of arts and crafts is an interest that many share and one that has had a long and uninterrupted tradition. In that respect, as an extension of her basket-shaped “embroidery” pieces in porcelain, Sidsel Hanum treats the spectacular as something to be found in her close surroundings, in the lines and forms of everyday objects, as in her grandmother’s old embroidery pieces, for example. Kari Skoe Fredriksen’s apparently violent treatment of Bogstad dinnerware – this standard-bearer of refined Norwegian taste and the unsullied purity of porcelain looks like it has been thrown against the wall and deformed – has many aspects to it. She includes references to the still life painting tradition in art history – especially popular during the Baroque period – thus revealing a desire to explore the meeting point between ceramics as a motif in painting and ceramics as everyday object.
Commentary on the overabundance of a consumer society is reflected quite directly in a number of works, among which many integrate waste as motif and metaphor. Nina Torp’s discreet pond in porcelain reflects a garbage pail, in addition to the surroundings and the viewers. Monica Marcella Askim uses the bulldozer as a continuously recurring element, which creates an ambivalent relationship between opposing qualities such as destruction and construction, and mechanical as opposed to natural processes. Ruta Pakarklyte also works with waste as a central motif in her ceramic projects. She seeks out the remains of consumption in a remarkable way that provokes thoughts about mortality, the frailty of civilisation and great catastrophes. Human beings discard unwanted things, including those of a physical nature.
Waste in the sense of trash culture is Ingrid Askeland’s guiding principle in the shaping of over-dimensioned beer bottles and beer cans in clay. They are consistently done in a fine comic strip drawing line similar to that of the Norwegian comic strip artist Christopher Nielsen and have reality shows, glamour models, debauchery and debacle as motifs. These popular culture objects can, according to the artist herself, represent society’s spiritual and moral decline. The familiar knick-knack associations in her work attain ever new heights. In Leaving Las Vegas she excels in her handling of ornamentation, gold, platinum, porcelain colours and mass-produced industrial decals, in addition to fibre optics linked to blinking LED lamps. Her works are skilfully designed tabloid commentaries.
Many of the works in the Triennial are thus presented as a counterbalance to a more firmly rooted everyday aesthetic, and Helene Kortner’s lavish style is particularly unrestrained and assumes no direct identifications. The Bohemian drama is played out with gusto. Occultism also appears in the exhibition, as in Annie Lindgren’s work entitled Consume, a form of Goth-ceramics. The jury’s requirement that the works touch the viewer has been amply satisfied and can be seen as a sign of the times. Many artistic styles appear to simultaneously rebel against the purity of modernism as well as the limitations of everyday aesthetics, and insist on being excessive according to their own premises.
Line Ulekleiv
Project Director, The Norwegian Assocation of Arts and Crafts