Twenty Thousand Years is on view at Galerie Fabian Lang, Zürich

March 5 – June 27, 2026

Featuring: Caroline Achaintre, Carl Anderson, Perrine Boudy, Gabi Deutsch, Sarah Dwyer, Clare Goodwin, Hippolyte Hentgen, Yulia Iosilzon, Guillaume Martin-Taton, Grayson Perry, Becky Tucker, Betty Woodman, Rita Zurbrügg

Oh, dear ceramics. You ware of the earth. You have something primal about you; you ground us. You feel like a deep breath of fresh Alpine air or like looking up from below into the crown of a thick tree trunk.

This is not an exhibition of historical antiquities, but perhaps a declaration of love. An exhibition about what today’s generation of artists can do with ceramics. Works that are equally virtuosic in terms of craftsmanship as they are in terms of artistry. Because that is precisely the crucial relationship. Nothing here is classical anymore, and yet the view on tradition plays a role for all artists here. We celebrate both how far the medium has come and how far one can go with it.

Everything made of ceramic is fragile, and yet it is the most long-lasting earth material that can be shaped by hand. Just think of the millennia-old ceramic treasures that we can still admire today in almost intact condition. It is one of the oldest means of artistic expression. Hundreds, thousands of years ago, our Palaeolithic ancestors must have noticed the material properties of clay. They must have seen the footprints of their prey – and their own heavy footsteps – pressed into the riverbanks, retaining their shape even when water collected in them. But there was still a long way to go before clay could be processed into ceramics.¹

Ceramics is a much broader concept than many might assume. It has long since emancipated itself from the ‘ceramics is just design’ pit. Interestingly, the first ceramic objects were not practical bowls, but works of art. Around 28,000 years ago, the Pavlovian culture of Gravettian Europe – a highly developed society of mammoth hunters – began using special clay kilns to fire small animal and human figures. Their most legendary work remains the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, a curvaceous figure considered to be the oldest known ceramic in the world.

Still until today, it is considered one of the most direct means of expression. Nearly all of the artists here in the exhibition spoke of the immediacy to the material in translating what they want to create. In today’s world, ceramics might even act therapeutic and keep us sane in the digital terror jungle. Philosophically, you can treat ceramics as this thing that turned against modernism.² Today, perhaps even as the thing that turns against digitalisation. Because, and this is also intrinsic to ceramics, you have to experience it. Images of the works shown here can never do justice to their surface texture, the reflections of light, their multi-sidedness and multi dimensionality.

If you leave aside the function of ceramics, what do you hold on to? From the exhibition catalogue of Hans Coper’s exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1969, he says: ‘Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to purpose and function, one has occasion to face absurdity. More than anything, somewhat like a demented piano-tuner, one is trying to approximate a phantom pitch.’ This is probably an apt description for what we find here in terms of virtuosity and ‘pitches’.

Perhaps the most radical artist working with ceramics, and an inspiration to many of the artists featured here, is the late Betty Woodman (1930–2018, USA). Betty’s ceramic practice shifted from the functional to the increasingly conceptual, drawing on the generous sculpturalism of Italian pottery for her Etruscan Vases works (1965-66) and – also on show – for her Pillow Pitchers (1970s-2000s), imbued too with the tradition of Chinese ceramic pillows, gloriously unwieldy in Betty’s reinterpretation. It was a time of ‘broadening my understanding of what clay could be’, said Betty, an early foretelling of her radical ceramic and painting assemblages, such as Summer View, (2014), which is on view in the exhibition: a protruding trompe l’oeil tabletop inhabited by spliced clay vessels.³

The artist Perrine Boudy (born in Versailles in 1995) is, by her own admission, a great admirer of Woodman. Her creations are also sculptures and should not really be understood as vases. They are inspired by Greco-Roman krater vases, but are unglazed and porous, and therefore unusable. She prefers not to be surprised by the colours of the glaze after firing and instead plays with engobes, which she uses ‘like aquarelle paints or ink’ before firing the piece in a single pass. The vase thus becomes three-dimensional paper. Drawing transformed into volume, striving to play with the boundary between drawing and ceramics. Boudy uses the vehicle of vases, which are charged with meaning and are ingrained in all our memories as irrefutable cultural heritage, and, in the spirit of a simulacrum, transforms them into a platform on which one can play around at will. Omage and transfigured comic drawing at the same time. She makes use of obsessively recurring motifs such as dots, volutes and stripes, purely ornamental, or comic book-like animals such as horses or dogs.

Caroline Achaintre (born 1969 in Toulouse, France / lives and works in London, UK) also toys with two- and three-dimensionality. She creates various characters, half fantastical, half ghostly, sometimes made of wool, sometimes of ceramic, in different dimensions. Solaroid appears like a carnival mask dazzled by the sun. In general, the European carnival, with its shape-shifting, plays an important role as a source of inspiration for Achaintre. The sun forces a squinting of the eye area and shrinks the ceramic sheet into a three-dimensional mask. Something that was originally two-dimensional becomes something animated and three-dimensional. Achaintres’ thought experiment perhaps goes even a step further, one might think: don’t you suddenly see things you didn’t see before when you yourselves squint your eyes and focus on a blurred spot?

For Sarah Dwyer (born 1974 in Ireland. Lives and works in London, UK), everything begins with drawing, but first on paper. Starting with life drawings, she reworks her life figures on canvas again and again, reducing them, stretching them lengthwise or widthwise, or squashing them together, until they have the right shape. For this, she uses her own abstract vocabulary of mark-making, which she has developed over a period of fifteen years, with a wink to the history of abstract figuration. Recently, she has been transferring the discourse she developed in painting to experimental ceramic sculptures. Between figuration and abstraction, her exploration of the nature of the gestural sign, the line, continues. The sculptures are like physical three-dimensional manifestations of brushstrokes. What is astonishing is how spontaneous and free they appear, completely concealing the fact that they have been so carefully layered and fired so many times to achieve the different surface textures, until just before the heat in the kiln would break them.

Like Dwyer, Gabi Deutsch (born 1973. Lives and works in Zurich, CH) explores forms of abstraction and translations into three-dimensional sculpture in her work. She probes the potential of the material, its structure and its possibilities for transformation, making the nature of the process visible. Forms from the history of architecture, art and design serve as references for her work. Deutsch has been working mainly with ceramics for several years. She creates hand-formed unique pieces that are situated between works of art and functional design objects.

As the only self-confessed designer in the group, Rita Zurbrügg comes very close to the boundary between the supposedly different worlds of art and design. As impressively artistic as they are, there should no longer be any distinction between the two. Also inspired by architecture, visual arts and the diversity of forms found in nature, Zurbrügg transforms clay into masterful sculptural objects for everyday use.

Since 2018, Guillaume Martin-Taton (born 1991 in Nîmes, FR. Lives and works in Geneva, CH) has been developing a ceramic practice in which chimera-like animals play a central role. These hybrid figures, which emerged from his research into signage systems and the Manitou alphabet, function as three-dimensional signs – simultaneously sculptural forms and coded presences. Drawing on aposematism and the visual warning strategies of the animal kingdom, he composes surfaces characterised by strong contrasts, rhythmic patterns and symbolic motifs. These creatures, which lie somewhere between artefact and totem, embody a language in which colour, ornament and volume serve as signals. Through them, ceramics become a space in which the sign detaches itself from the wall, takes on volume and transforms into a living, ambiguous figure – archaic and contemporary at the same time.

Becky Tucker‘s (born 1993 in Scarborough, UK. Lives and works in Glasgow, UK) shape- and genre-transcending sculptures and reliefs explore the intersection between ceramic tradition, cultural symbolism and the emotional intensity of contemporary cultural Angst. Her latest work, Hyetal, addresses the revered awe towards water and floods, an overwhelming, unstoppable force. It builds on the long tradition of rain/water deities and folkloric spirits. From the Greek Hyades – nymphs who bring rain – to Oya, the goddess of violent rainstorms in Yoruba mythology, to the Kelpies – malevolent water spirits in Scottish folklore. The figure stretches upwards towards the rain and downwards towards the earth – in searching. The barely human figure is ambiguous in terms of gender and age; it is unclear what is costume and what is skin. She sits there, seemingly oblivious, except for her six eternally open eyes.

As already mentioned, ceramics have been attributed with a kind of healing effect. This may be due to the immediately fulfilling haptic qualities of clay and the variety of possibilities it offers. Carl Anderson (born 1990 in Shoreham-by-Sea, UK. Lives and works in West Sussex, UK) regards ceramics as a form of trauma therapy. A rather serious trauma that he has to cope with. Anderson was the victim of a knife attack that nearly cost him his life. His series ‘Spoon Warmer’ shows various grinning trolls whose protruding ‘head world’ forms a mysterious arm that hides an object or a hand signal behind their backs. Their grin is intended to distract from the secret code, but at the same time arouses suspicion about their true intentions. The title and the comic-like, playful appearance of the now obsolete spoon warmer play with the feeling of feel-good domesticity, while the sculpture tells of hidden threat and deception. A tense dialogue emerges between harm and care, digital and physical, violence and safeguarding, absurdity and seriousness. Anderson questions what can still be trusted in today’s world.

Clare Goodwin‘s (born 1973 in Birmingham, UK. Lives and works in Zurich, CH) ceramic works are an extension of her painting practice. With them, she challenges her own paintings on canvas, which are rooted in hard-edge abstraction. Glaze becomes colour field and line, blurring the hard structures of her paintings and introducing a softer, tactile, architectural presence between object, surface and image. Sometimes she also breaks up the forms and reassembles them like a mosaic. In doing so, Goodwin introduces a pattern-based colour scheme that reflects personal and found objects with abstract representations of domestic interiors. A quiet beauty emerges, a kind of ‘constructive nostalgia’ that allows geometric fragments and muted colour relationships to integrate between painting, tile and object.

Yulia Iosilzon‘s (born 1992 in Moscow, RU. Lives and works in London, UK) work also straddles the boundary between painting, ceramics and world-building, and likewise consists of mosaic fragments. Less tied to abstraction than Goodwin, and more to figurativeness, Iosilzon merges narrative and ornament into a single pictorial logic. They transport the viewer into landscapes that appear both mythical and interior. Iosilzon deepens her exploration of translucency and fluidity—qualities that extend beyond the material surface into the architecture of her compositions. These new ceramic paintings open a dialogue between the personal and the cosmic, between the remembered structures of mythology and the instability of contemporary experience. The visual language unfolds through a series of scenes in which human and natural forms are intertwined, creating moments of transformation. Through this ongoing tension between disintegration and creation, Iosilzon transforms inherited symbolic narratives into psychological dramas full of ambiguities. The mythical no longer dictates moral consequences, but provides a framework for exploring porous identities, shifting emotional states, and the generative instability between form and feeling.

The Tribu series by artist duo Hippolyte Hentgen (Gaëlle Hippolyte born 1977 in Perpignan, FR. Lina Hentgen born 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand, FR. Live and work in Paris, FR) ties in with the tradition of the objet trouvé and is perhaps the third strand in the field of mosaic creations. Originally conceived at the invitation of the Cristallerie Saint Louis Museum (Hermès Foundation) in Saint Louis les Bitches, France, the duo worked with remnants from the Cristallerie that revealed imperfections in the crystal. Each sculpture was an assemblage of crystal elements, objects found at flea markets and cut-out images. In the case of Tribu here, all the elements consist of ceramic objects found at flea markets. These sculptures function like rebuses. As in collages, analogies or connections between new ideas arise through the association of the visible and hidden original history of the objects used.

The sculpture is combined with one of the artists’ latest drawings from the ‘Patterns’ series. The Patterns are based on fragments or close-ups of elements from Italian Renaissance paintings, combined with abstract motifs resembling fabric patterns, just like Goodman’s work. A postmodern pop effect is achieved by using art history to address and change the discussion about representation.

British artist Grayson Perry (born 1960 in Chelmsford, UK. Lives and works in London, UK), winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, creates, among others, enchantingly beautiful pots, hand-sewn quilts and extravagant clothing designs that convey provocative themes. At the heart of his work is a passionate desire to comment on profound injustices in society. Perry uses pots as a narrative and figurative medium, as a round, curved surface for bizarre or bitter stories. In the richly textured work Untitled (1992), the sentence “Are not murder, pollution, perversion and all forms of evil natural as well? appears alongside photo transfers of an innocent horse, cute dogs, hands praying to God and an engraving of a king and his mistress, both naked. The king has grown breasts, he has a pregnant belly and has to stand on platform shoes to be at least as tall as his much younger lover with her iron corset. Need we say more?

Contact
info@fabianlang.ch

Galerie Fabian Lang
Obere Zäune 12
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

Captions

• Installation views of twenty thousand years, 2026, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich, CH. Copyright/credits: © The artists and Galerie Fabian Lang. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Becky Tucker, Hyetal, 2026, Glazed stoneware and fabric, 180 x 57 x 40 cm, 70.87 x 22.44 x 15.75 in. Copyright/credits: © Becky Tucker. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Betty Woodman, Summer View, 2013, Glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, acrylic paint, canvas and wood, 152.4 x 109.22 x 29.21 cm, 60 x 43 x 11.5 in. Copyright/credits: © Woodman Family Foundation. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and the Woodman Family Foundation. Photo: Annik Wetter.
• Caroline Achaintre, Solaroid, 2019, Ceramic, 35 x 25 x 7 cm, 13.78 x 9.84 x 2.76 in. Copyright/credits: © Caroline Achaintre. Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha.
• Carl Anderson, Unzipped, 2025, Glazed stoneware, 39.5 x 16 x 23.5 cm, 15.55 x 6.3 x 9.25 in. Copyright/credits: © Carl Anderson. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Gabi Deutsch, Lamp (Your Power), 2024, Glazed ceramic, ink on polystyrene, 100 x 36 x 36 cm, 39.37 x 14.17 x 14.17 in. Copyright/credits: © Gabi Deutsch. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Grayson Perry, Untitled, c. 1992, Glazed ceramic, 46 x 21.5 x 21.5 cm, 18.11 x 8.46 x 8.46 in. Copyright/credits: © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo: Jack Hems.
• Hippolyte Hentgen, Series “Tribu”, 2025, Mixed media, 74 x 14 x 14 cm, 29.13 x 5.51 x 5.51 in. Copyright/credits: © Galerie Bernard Jordan. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Bernard Jordan.
• Perrine Boudy, Valet de cœur, 2024, Engobe on red earthenware, 69 x 47 x 53 cm, 27.17 x 18.5 x 20.87 in. Copyright/credits: © Perrine Boudy. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Rita Zurbrügg, Untitled, 2024, Ceramic, engobed and glazed, 21 x 24 x 13 cm, 8.27 x 9.45 x 5.12 in. Copyright/credits: © Rita Zurbrügg. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Clare Goodwin, Ceramic Whisper/Still Scape, 2026, Hand cut/Hand glazed ceramic, Left: 30 x 21 cm, 11.81 x 8.27 in., Right: 33 x 25 cm, 12.99 x 9.84 in. Copyright/credits: © Clare Goodwin. Courtesy of the artist and Lullin + Ferrari.
• Guillaume Martin-Taton, Krotok, 2024, Glazed earthenware, 37.5 x 27.5 x 31 cm, 14.76 x 10.83 x 12.2 in. Copyright/credits: © Guillaume Martin-Taton. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Sarah Dwyer, Hone-Onna, 2024, Glaze, engobe, earthenware, 37 x 32 x 23 cm, 14.57 x 12.6 x 9.06 in. Copyright/credits: © Sarah Dwyer. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang.
• Yulia Iosilzon, Reflections, 2026, Glazed stoneware on wood, 66 x 76 cm, 25.98 x 29.92 in. Copyright/credits: © Yulia Iosilzon. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Fabian Lang. Photo: Deniz Güzel.

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of the transformation”.¹

R. Solnit

Introduction

I am fascinated by stories that melt in the kiln with minerals and metal oxides in the thick viscosity of ceramic glazes and remain for centuries after cooling.

Since I started working in ceramics eighteen years ago, glaze has been at the heart of my practice. I have been interested in both the process of making it – learning to predict and influence the result – and the significance of the color of this vessel’s outer layer.

Ceramics has historically been woven as craft, with narratives about industry, technology, and nature. This triangle draws my attention because it conveys a romantic image of craftspeople resisting industry and healing the scars left by large-scale production on the environment. For my own reasons, I both submit to this romantic idea while at the same time, I strive to keep a peripheral and critical perspective on the ceramics of today’s reality. I think both those stories of resistance and critical perspectives are important to be told and re-told today.

My curious and creative investigations of nature/industry/technology triangle through ground minerals have intensified through the years of practice and teaching. It fostered both my deep knowledge of the matter and my writing practice. In my glaze and writing, I strive to maintain a close relationship with both the materials I work with and the stories I encounter along the way.

A year ago, I was selected for the project Vad Händer? (What is happening?) run by Folk&Form and the Konsthantverkcentrum. Each of the ten selected artists was invited to explore the archive of one museum in the region Västragötaland in Sweden and see what happens then.

The creative process of the ten craft artists selected for the project Vad Händer was on display at the Textile Museum of Borås (Sweden) until the 15th of March 2026.

In the list of the proposed museums to collaborate with in the project Vad Händer?, I was chosen to work with the Rörstrand Museum in Lidköping. Rörstrand is a Swedish porcelain factory. It started in 1726 in Stockholm before moving to Göteborg in 1926. It later moved to Lidköping, where production moved to Sri Lanka in 2007, leaving behind empty buildings, a museum, and its archives.

Chapter 1. When a color is dead.

Jenny, the curator of Rörstrand museum, has taken out a pile of notebooks. The small leather-covered books are displayed on a table in between the shelves of the archive, under the ground of the former porcelain factory area of Rörstrand in Lidköping. Neon bulbs lighten the place; it smells a mix of dust and light humidity.

With white cotton gloves, I quickly open one book and read through the pages. They are filled with handwritten recipes of glazes. All the recipes have titles like Grön matt; Glasyr J; Glasyr B; Tobakburk; Pink4, etc. Sometimes there are notes in the margins. Under the title, I can quickly recognize the familiar names of ingredients like Flusspat; Kaolin; Kvartz.

As Jenny told us that we would not stay long in the archive, I hastily took pictures of all the recipes I found interesting and that could potentially interest me in the future: the rose colors and several bases. Having securely saved the pictures on my camera, I leave the archive without yet knowing what I will do with them.

Some days later, looking back at my pictures, I notice that the notebooks have been written by the same man, Waldemar Lindström, from 1875 to 1937. W. Lindström has been the chief of the ceramic workshop at the Rörstrand factory in Göteborg.

The other thing I notice is the name of the ingredients: many glazes contain lead. This poisonous material was commonly used in glazes to produce vivid colors and transparent, shiny glazes. Some other poisonous materials are also mentioned, like Uranium or Kalium dichromate (K2Cr207). Fortunately, it is no longer used, but it makes most of the recipes I recorded unusable.

At this point, it sounds like none of the recipes can be used today. The knowledge and craftsmanship developed by this man, and for sure by a team of people working together at Rörstrand, seems to be lost: not usable anymore, and maybe for the best of our health, never again. It seems like the small leather notebooks golden at the edges of the pages are like graves for all those colors that will never exist anymore.

When is a glaze recipe lost? Were the recipes lost before I found them?

As Rebecca Solnit describes it², loss is a transformative journey: a before, when you know, and an after, when you don’t know. It is a state of mind in which you suddenly know you are lost: emptiness, loneliness, a need to find your way.

Those recipes have already made a journey from being used in a factory to being an archive in a cellar. Lost?

Chapter 2. When a color is calling to be reborn.

Can one say that being alive is changing and moving? The recipes recorded in the book have been moving and changing, maybe exchanged before being archived. Where are the bases J, S, B from? They certainly have been adapted, variated, and tested before being rewritten several times in the notebooks.

And then suddenly, the recipes were stuck. They stopped to change and to be exchanged. They are like lying in the notebook in the silence of death in the archive.

There is a transformative journey intrinsic to the glaze material from rocks to powders, and to glazeslip, and then to fired glass – a solid-liquid as it can be described; a non-crystallized form of crystals of rocks; a magnification of the white powders melted into bright colors. It is a matter that is transformed through mixing and firing. The result after firing is partially unknown, as I can only slowly, through a repeated process of mixing, firing, and observing, predict the results, even if never entirely.

What drives me forward in this research is precisely the unknown: the wish to find this state of not knowing, the wish to explore new areas where I don’t yet know the results, the wish to be lost so I can find new ways.

It was the same desire that pushed me to enter the archive of the Rörstrand factory: to enter an unknown place, be in this state of being lost, where I don’t know where I am and what I see, where to look. And then, eventually find my way, develop my own tools of finding in the labyrinth of archives.

I feel an urge to recompose myself and get out of a state of being lost. It is a matter of survival; no creation seems possible without knowing that I am lost.

The glaze is recomposing itself through the firing process; it is finding its own balance in between the material of the recipe: in the oxidation reaction that characterizes the type of firing I am driving in my studio, some atoms lose oxygen and because of this unbalanced state, they recompose with others to find a new balance. In this way, they reconnect with each other in new constellations and create texture, thickness, and colors. It is the trace of this intrinsic movement that is visible after the quick cooling down of the glaze after the end of the firing.

Chapter 3. When the color is reborn.

I designed a GlazeLab several years ago. It is a ceramic class for adults where, step by step, participants learn how to start mixing glaze. By mixing, observing, and analyzing together, they are learning from each other and beginning to find their own way in glaze creation.

In the GlazeLab I held during autumn 2025, I proposed that participants test together several recipes from W. Lindström’s book: I chose a few that did not include lead or other poisonous materials. We mixed several bases from the notebooks of W. Lindström (S, J, and B) with several oxide mixtures. After we got those first firing results, observed and analyzed them, we chose to continue with this recipe: J Matt Grön 4.

From this recipe, what I know is the title and a list of ingredients. What I don’t know is the firing temperature and firing atmosphere. Those are two essential elements of the glazes that can impact the results. (But how does it matter anyway, as I have no idea of the expected result of this recipe?) Something I do not know either is the expected result by W.Lindström. The only thing that helps me guess is the title of the glaze, which means “Green mat glaze” in Swedish. Lost in the unknown, we are like blind persons, cautiously going in the dark.

We decided with the participants to slightly adapt the recipe, decrease the amount of copper oxide to make it less metallic. The results of this second test have the lab participants enthusiastic. The glaze covers the piece well, does not run down onto the kiln and has a beautiful leopard dark marble surface on the green matt background. With one of the participants, we decided to mix a larger amount into 3 kilograms to glaze larger pieces.

Nevertheless, the first test of the larger amount of glazeslip is way less convincing. We are all tremendously disappointed. The green is pale, transparent, and full of many pinholes. At several places, there are large brown mat surfaces, as if all the copper oxide had fallen there. After reading some books and discussing with ceramicist colleagues, the dark spots seem to be due to the copper oxide, which tends to run down too quickly from the bucket when we dip the bisque-fired piece in it. This can be due to a lack of clay in the recipe. Those conclusions led to a series of new tests with deflocculant and bentonite.

As those tests are still on their way. From one firing to the next, with the participants in the lab, we are going through disappointment, curiosity, and discouragement, and gaining a better understanding of the material we use. Through this process, we are learning to make it our own: reach the desired color, learn how thick to apply it to the piece, maybe with other glazes on top, and how to make it fit the condition of the collective shared space of a school.

Each participant makes their own way to use it, to look at it.

Chapter 4. When a color is alive.

Glaze colors are calling to be born. Inside me, this creative impulse feels the right and only way to be followed.

Glaze recipes are, in themselves, collaborative creations. They come from a potter who received them from another potter (with varying degrees of consent). You got it, maybe, from someone else who did the same. Each person in this transmission chain has had the chance to adapt the recipe, maybe give it a new name.

The J base glaze from Rörstrand is made from a mix of quartz, kaolin, feldspar, chalk, and zinc oxide. This recipe is not unique. You can find those materials gathered in many other recipes in different balances. It means that it has been spread out from somewhere, transmitted, developed, created, re-created, until it has been archived underground at the former Rörstrand factory. Even in the book by W. Lindström, you can find this recipe rewritten several times, as if it needed to be recorded to continue being used.

Glaze recipes are alive when they change, when they are used, recreated and reimagined. They are alive when their colors become meaningful to someone’s creative desire. It feels strongly alive when, during the glazelab, it triggers happiness, curiosity, surprise, or disappointment. It feels alive when it cooperates or resists to fit the requirements of a given environment.

While mixing this recipe with the other people of the Glazelab, we were giving life back to a craftsman’s desire to create this recipe, a desire that had long been dormant. By adapting and recreating this recipe, it becomes possible for it to continue to be used, carrying its title and its history, and all the craft persons who have been collaborating through generations in its never-ending re-creation.

Anne-Marie Dehon is a ceramic artist based in Sweden, originally from Belgium. After earning a degree in political science, she studied ceramics with F. Urrejola (Lodève, FR) and painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Brussels, BE). She worked as an artist in Brussels between 2012 and 2020, before moving to Sweden in 2020. She graduated from Hdk-Valand (Gothenburg, SE) in ceramic art and more recently from the Research Lab at Konstfack (Stockholm, SE). She is one of the co-founders of the Kollektiv Tontouristen.

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Captions

• Rorstrand archive. Photos © Anne-Marie Dehon
• Vad Händer at the Textile Museum of Borås, Sweden, 2026. Photos © Anna Sigge

Handmade, Rewritten: Ceramics in a Digital World

This May Maak presents ‘Contemporary Ceramics + Craft’, a curated sale of works by the leading names in studio ceramics, alongside important makers working in wood, glass, fibre and silver.

As Maak celebrates 15 years of auctions dedicated to contemporary ceramics and craft, the latest auction offers an opportunity to reflect on the significance of the handmade in an increasingly digital world. In a cultural moment shaped by screens, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, people are being drawn to tactile, materially grounded handmade objects with a renewed sense of urgency.

Across both the art market and wider culture, there is growing evidence of a shift, especially amongst younger collectors, towards the authenticity and individuality of one-of-a-kind objects that can be physically engaged with rather than simply viewed. This desire is often perceived as a reaction to digital saturation.

As a movement, studio ceramics has been exploring material and form for over a century and in doing so has long embodied these qualities. What feels newly relevant today is not the emergence of the material-based arts, but a renewed attention to its depth and complexity.

The Maak auction brings together a carefully considered selection of ceramic and craft disciplines that focus on materiality and reveal the maker’s hand. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the works in the sale reveal a field that is both deeply rooted and constantly evolving – one in which tradition, experimentation, and play exist side by side.

View the Contemporary Ceramics + Craft auction

The idea of ceramics standing in opposition to the dominant cultural forces of its time is not new. The narrative of 20th-century studio pottery, shaped by figures such as Bernard Leach (lots 6-12) and Michael Cardew (lots 36-39), was grounded in ideals of honesty, utility, and restraint, with handmade objects positioned as a moral and aesthetic counterpoint to industrialisation.

The foundations of the movement and subsequent exchange of ideas was itself slow and physical – rooted in travel, collaboration, and the movement of philosophies and objects across cultures. Leach’s time in Japan, and his return to St Ives with Hamada Shoji (lots 13-16) in 1920, established a dialogue between East and West that was embedded in making. Similarly, Cardew’s work in Abuja, Nigeria in the 1950s – where he worked alongside Ladi Kwali – demonstrates how techniques and traditions were adapted through direct, lived experience. Two works in the auction by Cardew (lot 39) and Kwali (lot 40) were each made in Abuja and demonstrate the fusion of the Eastern influenced stoneware techniques Cardew adopted from Leach with the indigenous pottery style of Abuja.

Set against today’s instant global connectivity, this earlier model of exchange feels markedly different. Yet the impulse remains the same: a desire to share knowledge through material practice.

Whilst the values and traditional techniques associated with Leach and Cardew have continued into the 21st century – as seen in the work of Richard Batterham (lots 43-47) and Jim Malone (lots 48-49) – they represent only one strand within a much broader field. The introduction of European modernism by émigré artists Lucie Rie (lots 52-64), Hans Coper (lots 65-68) and Ruth Duckworth (lots 74-75) expanded the possibilities of ceramics, opening it up to new formal and conceptual approaches. From this point, the discipline became increasingly diverse, experimental, and at times deliberately challenging. The qualities of the handmade in ceramics was no longer singular philosophy but an ongoing exploration.

The 1970s proved a particularly dynamic moment of experimentation and ongoing redefinition of the handmade. Artists associated with the ‘New Ceramics’ movement – Elizabeth Fritsch, Alison Britton, Jacqueline Poncelet and Carol McNicoll – challenged the conventions of studio pottery by blurring the boundaries between vessel-making, sculpture, and painting. Their work pushed ceramics beyond function and into a more conceptual and expressive territory. This shift is reflected in the auction, which includes a significant group of works by Elizabeth Fritsch, from her first solo exhibition in 1974 (lot 198) through the following three decades (lots 199–202), alongside works by Alison Britton (lot 203) and Carol McNicoll (lots 204-207).

For some artists, such as Ewen Henderson, the exploration was focused on pushing the material properties of clay to its limits over the course of his career. Where earlier forms (such as lots 108 and 109) still loosely reference traditional forms and techniques, later works (lots 111 and 117) demonstrate how forms were pushed to the edge of collapse, surfaces fractured or distorted, and glazes behave unpredictably. These works emphasise process rather than conceal it; they retain a sense of risk, even of failure. If the earlier studio tradition sought harmony, this approach embraced tension. Clay is not simply shaped—it is negotiated with.

By contrast, an artist like Duncan Ross has spent decades refining a single technique as seen in lot 193. Each iteration of his vessels introduce subtle adjustments in proportion, surface, or balance. The result is not repetition, but distillation – an accumulation of knowledge embedded in the hand. In an age that privileges speed and constant innovation, this kind of sustained attention offers a quiet resistance.

Within this environment of creative exploration and diversity, it is interesting to observe how artists define parameters for their own practice. For some, like John Ward (lots 150-163), this takes the form of self-imposed restraint. Ward would repeatedly revisit a core group of vessel forms, refining them through subtle variation whilst working within a deliberately limited palette of glazes and decorative devices. The immense appeal of John Ward’s pots to those who collect them is the warmth and tactile quality that comes from the way they engage with their physical environment. The geometric designs of his black and white pots – five of which have been selected for this auction – were inspired by the way shadows would fall on newly made pots in the studio. Ward’s work demonstrates how restriction can generate depth.

A similar commitment to restraint can be seen in the work of Edmund de Waal, whose practice is defined by an almost exclusive use of porcelain and a sustained focus on the cylinder form as seen in lots 262-272. Through subtle shifts in proportion, surface, and arrangement, de Waal transforms repetition into a form of enquiry. His work extends the language of the handmade beyond the individual object, situating it within carefully constructed installations like ‘not yet’, 2012 (lot 272) that engage with space, memory, and architecture. In doing so, it reflects a broader expansion of what ceramics can be, quietly moving from object to environment.

What emerges from these varied approaches in an understanding of the diversity of what the handmade can be. It is not synonymous with imperfection, nor with tradition. Instead, it encompasses both precision and disruption, discipline and experimentation. The contemporary ceramic landscape is defined by this plurality.

Beyond questions of process and philosophy, ceramics exerts another, more immediate pull: it engages the body. Unlike much contemporary visual culture, which is designed to be consumed at a distance, ceramic objects invite a physical response. On seeing a tea bowl by Emmanuel Cooper (lot 168), one imagines its weight, its balance, the texture of the surface in the hand. In a very different way, a sensitivity to surface and touch is also evident in the work of Jennifer Lee where the material of her vessels, like lot 274, invite close, physical engagement.

This “urge to touch” is not incidental; it is central to how these works are understood. In more playful works, such as the work of Ian Godfrey (lots 127-131), the forms themselves become a point of engagement, inviting not just admiration but curiosity, even amusement. These objects resist passive viewing. They ask to be handled, to be lived with.

These haptic qualities are intrinsic to many ceramic works and are especially resonant in functional forms, where tactility is experienced in everyday use. The feel of an Akiko Hirai sake cup in the hand, warmed by tea poured from a teapot with its distinctive twisted willow handle (lot 291), becomes a quiet, multi-sensory experience.

Importantly, this tactile dimension extends beyond ceramics. In a mixed-media context, it becomes possible to see how different craft disciplines share a common language. Whether working in glass, wood, metal, or textile, contemporary makers are often interested in the physical encounter between object and viewer, as seen in works across the sale, where similar concerns with material, process, and tactility extend beyond ceramics into other craft disciplines.

It is not the intention to frame this as a “return” to the handmade as the handmade never disappeared. What has shifted is how it is understood and valued, particularly by new audiences for whom ceramics and craft feel especially attuned as an antidote to the present moment.

The works brought together in this auction reflect that shift. They offer something that much of contemporary culture does not: resistance to speed, to uniformity, to distance. It insists instead on time, touch, and reflection.

We invite you to view the auction online or visit us in the gallery and consider what these objects offer – especially now – when material, integrity, and human connection feel more vital than ever.

The auction is now viewing online. The Covent Garden gallery exhibition and bidding will open on Saturday 9 May, with bidding closing on Thursday 14 May at maaklondon.com

About Maak
Maak is the leading auction house specialising in contemporary ceramics and craft. Known for its expertly curated sales and dedication to showcasing the best in international ceramics and craft, Maak provides a platform for collectors to acquire rare and exceptional works from both established and emerging artists through both their regular auction schedule and private sales.

Sofia Beça: Where the Body Listens to Matter — Records of a Working Body is on view at Espaço Mira, Porto

April 11 – June 6, 2026

The works presented in this exhibition result from three artist residencies carried out in China, between 2024 and 2025, in Shangyu, Jingdezhen and Yixing. They were developed in distinct contexts, with specific materials and working conditions that directly influenced the way each piece was constructed.

Porcelain, worked in Shangyu and Jingdezhen, allowed for the exploration of limits of thickness, continuity and resistance. Stoneware, in Yixing, imposed greater density and restraint, leading to more compact forms and a more direct approach to the material.

The exhibition does not separate these moments. It brings them into relation. The works are organised in series and variations, where small differences accumulate. There are no unique pieces in an isolated sense — each exists within a set.

The presence of writing and print runs through several works. It appears fragmented, incomplete, sometimes almost illegible. It is not text for continuous reading, but material integrated into the very construction of the pieces. In Yixing, some of these presences approach literary references, such as the texts of Su Dongpo, not as citation, but as a point of contact between language and matter.

The exhibition also includes videos and photographs produced during the residencies. They show the places, the working processes and the concrete conditions in which the works were made. They do not function as external documentation, but as part of the work itself.

Sound is present on two levels. An installation composed of around 2,400 small ceramic elements, suspended in four lines of five metres, enters into vibration and produces a resonance close to that of bells. In parallel, the exhibition includes a sound piece by Jorge Queijo, a musician invited by the artist, which moves through the space and interferes with the perception of the whole.

This work was developed in a cultural context that is not that of the artist. This displacement is not a theme, but a condition: it affects time, available materials, ways of working and the relationship with what is produced. The exhibition thus presents a body of work constructed from these conditions, without separating process and result.

Contact
miragalerias@miragalerias.net

Espaço Mira
MIRA Galerias
Rua Miraflor, no 155 / 159,
4300 – 334, Porto
Portugal

Photos by Antonio Chaves

Forms From The Subsoil is on view at Sala de Arte CCU, Santiago, Chile

April 9 – June 5, 2026

Participating artists: Magdalena Atria, Renata Ayala, Macarena Correa, José Cori, Colomba Fontaine, Martín Kaulen, Patricio Kind, Mariette Lefranc, Rocío Olivares, Daniela Pulido, Paula Subercaseaux, Valentina Soto, Catalina Vial and Catalina Zarzar.

Ceramics carries a familiar history: vessel, function, craft, permanence. For centuries, it has been tied to utility, ritual, everyday use and, of course, manual skill. Forms from the Subsoil begins precisely from the possibility of interrupting that familiarity. Not in order to deny this history, but to ask again under what conditions ceramics appears today, what relations it activates, and what status it acquires when it no longer responds docilely to the categories that have historically organized it.

The exhibition does not attempt to offer a survey of contemporary ceramics. Instead, it proposes a scene in which the medium shifts its condition. Clay appears as surface, volume, edge, residue, structure, skin, module or fragment. At times it preserves a memory of the vessel; at others, it seems to have passed through that genealogy and become organism, relief, expanded image or spatial device. Rather than a rejection of tradition, what emerges is an insistent negotiation with it: a ceramics that does not entirely abandon its narratives of origin, but does not allow itself to be contained by them either.

This condition is activated through the way the works are placed in relation to one another. The exhibition display avoids a neutral or individual sequence and instead proposes a syntax of appearances. Shelves, platforms, metal racks, open structures and suspended surfaces displace ceramics from the singular logic of the pedestal, distributing it across multiple regimes of reading. At moments, the display suggests a worktable; at others, an archive, a storage room, a shelf or an architectural structure. The meaning of each piece depends on its form, surface and scale, but also on its proximity, isolation and the neighborhood in which it is inscribed.

For this reason, the exhibition is better understood less as a group of objects than as a system of circulation. Some works, when gathered together, form communities; others produce differences, contrasts or shared scenes. Others, by contrast, interrupt the route and change the temperature of the exhibition. Certain pieces break through the overall density in order to reveal another rhythm within the show. A raw material such as quartz, associated with the formulation of glazes, may cease to be a recipe and become an autonomous surface; a binding material such as slip may shift toward drawing and cartography; a form close to furniture, such as a table, may open an ambiguous zone between art, design and use.

The “subsoil” of the title may seem obvious: it refers to the physical origin of clay, to minerals, sediments and materials extracted from the earth. But it also points to a historical and sensorial thickness. It is deposit, stratum, pressure and latency: a zone where inherited techniques, persistent errors, industrial procedures, formal intuitions, affective gestures and barely visible imaginaries accumulate. In some works, such as those by Catalina Vial, this appears as a recomposition of layers, traces and contacts. In others, such as Martín Kaulen’s, it becomes the sedimentation of an unstable perception. Elsewhere, as in Daniela Pulido’s work, it emerges as a symbolic memory condensed in forms that touch upon the ritual or the heraldic without fully settling into either register. Even the counterform, the mold and the casting process, so visible in certain operations by Renata Ayala, bring this ground to the surface as an active part of the work.

Seen up close, many of these pieces share an unstable morphology. Not because they are poorly defined, but because they refuse to settle into a single formal family. At times, matter shifts toward image; elsewhere, the line thickens until it becomes edge, drawing in space or supporting structure. In other works, volume opens, perforates or crumbles, as if preserving the memory of an internal pressure. Some forms seem to emerge through patient accumulation; others through assemblage, stitching, grafting or modular repetition. In Paula Subercaseaux’s Hormigueros series, for example, the surface concentrates a contained intensity, almost as if excavated. In other areas of the exhibition, porosity, opacity and filtration push the reading toward less resolved states, closer to material testing than to the closure of the object. This instability is also a negotiation with the technical conditions of the medium: shrinkage, fracture, collapse, the memory of firing, and the resistance of the material.

It is here that the exhibition becomes especially fertile. The works cease to assert themselves as closed units and begin to behave as neighborhoods. The display organizes these differences in order to sustain them. The ornamental, the tectonic, the playful and the architectural remain together. Without abandoning the singularity of each work, the exhibition attempts to construct a scene of contagion, resonance and friction.

There is also a deeper intuition running through the exhibition: ceramics retains a historical capacity to gather. Long before modernity separated art from craft, utility from autonomy, clay was tied to scenes of assembly and ritual: the table, the offering, storage, ceremony, mourning. Ceramics contains things; more importantly, it also contains ways of being together. Perhaps this is why it has proven so difficult to discipline completely. Even when it is reduced to craft or elevated to sculpture, a fundamental ambiguity persists within it: it remains intimate and public, utilitarian and symbolic, tactile and speculative, domestic and architectural at the same time.

Forms from the Subsoil works through this ambiguity without attempting to resolve it. Far from offering a conciliatory image of the medium, it configures a territory in tension. Ceramics appears as a matter that never fully settles: it accumulates layers, remains and excesses; it changes meaning depending on where it is placed; it is affected by architecture, distance, support and the company of other forms. The exhibition does not seek to establish a new definition of ceramics. Instead, it leaves it open, as something still taking place and deliberately unwilling to come to rest.

Curatorship – Exhibition Design – Furniture Design: Patricio Kind
Production: Patricio Kind – Claudia Verdejo – Celeste Vilches
Exhibition Design Render: Camilo Contreras
Furniture Construction: Ignacio Mardones
Installation: Periferia Arte – Viviana Herrera – Ignacio Mardones – Teresa Córdova – Alejandro Orellana – Celeste Vilches
Gallery Map Design: Celeste Vilches
Paint Sponsorship: KRACK
With the support of: FAAD UDP / Escuela de Arte, through the Artistic Creation Grant Fund

Contact
ccuenelarte@ccu.cl

Sala de Arte CCU
Av. Vitacura 2680
Las Condes, Santiago
Chile

Photos by Jorge Brantmayer

If you happen to be in London over the coming week(s), several major ceramics events are worth adding to your calendar. Ceramics Unbound launches at the Affordable Art Fair Hampstead from May 6–10, marking the fair’s first dedicated ceramics exhibition, curated by Caroline Jackman. Ceramic Art London returns to Olympia West from May 8–10, bringing together leading studio ceramic artists in one of the UK’s most important ceramics fairs. Next week, Secret Ceramics returns during London Craft Week at Sotheby’s from May 11–17, presenting 100 donated works by leading and emerging artists, sold anonymously in support of FiredUp4 Clay Clubs. I also recommend visiting Refigured: Embodiment in Contemporary Ceramics at County Hall Pottery, on view from May 12 to June 21, with a private view on May 11 (the final exhibition in the gallery’s in-house program before the space closes this summer).

Looking beyond London, the ceramics calendar remains full this month, with exhibitions, competitions, and fairs opening or taking place across Europe and beyond. Highlights include the XVII International Ceramic Biennial of Manises (opens May 8, Manises, Spain), the LOEWE Craft Prize 2026 (opens May 13, Singapore), the Diessener Pottery Market (May 14–17, Dießen am Ammersee, Germany), the 6th International Ceramics Triennial UNICUM (opens May 15, Ljubljana, Slovenia), the 43rd Concurs International de Ceràmica de l’Alcora (opens May 16, L’Alcora, Spain), and the Ceramic Market Andenne – Li Dièle (May 24–25, Andenne, Belgium). Find more events in our 2026 calendar.

The city of Castellamonte (Italy) has opened applications for the international competition Ceramics in Love, organized as part of the 65th Castellamonte Ceramics Exhibition. Open to all ceramic artists, the competition focuses on ceramics as a field of passion, originality, and contemporary expression, across art and design. Selected works will be exhibited at Palazzo Botton from August 22 to September 13, 2026. Awards include a €4,000 first prize. Applications are due May 30, 2026.

Ceramic artists based in the US are invited to submit their work for the Baltimore Clayworks Clay Biennial 2027, a national juried exhibition organized by Baltimore Clayworks in conjunction with the 61st Conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). Juried by Ching Yuan Chang, the exhibition highlights the diversity and evolving language of contemporary ceramics, welcoming functional, sculptural, installation-based, and experimental works. The exhibition will be on view from January 9 to March 13, 2027, with applications due September 25, 2026.

Applications are now open for Small Favors 2026, the 20th anniversary edition of the popular exhibition organized by The Clay Studio. Open to US-based artists working in any media, the exhibition challenges participants to create works that fit within a 4-inch cube, encouraging experimentation at a small scale. Selected pieces will be exhibited and offered for sale from October 8 to December 31, 2026, with a broad price range aimed at both new and established collectors. Applications are due June 1, 2026.

The Clay Studio continues its Clay & Conversations series this May with three online talks featuring artists, curators, and scholars. On May 7, partners from the Museum for Art in Wood will discuss Radical Americana with Jennifer Navva Milliken, Viola Bordon, and BA Harrington. On May 14, art historian Ezra Shales will present his new book, Pitchers of American Life: Art Within Reach. The series continues on May 21 with Laura Keim of Stenton, previewing upcoming Radical Americana exhibitions. All events take place on Zoom, and registration is free.

The North West Ceramics Foundation will host their next Speakers Series on Sunday, May 24, 2026, at 4pm PST, featuring Australian artist Dr. Peter Wilson. Dr. Wilson’s talk Materiality, intuition, heart, head and hands: seduced by the magic of clay will focus on the various stages of his life as a potter: continuous learning, skill development, understanding materials, the fire, glazes, the striving for perfection, finding a direction, and the need for constant renewal, what he calls “trying to fix a silent poem in clay.”

Book recommendation: Queer Crafts: Material Practices and the Making of Identity by Daniel Fountain. Through a focused analysis of work made from textiles, ceramics, wood, paper, metal, and glass, this book explores how contemporary artists, designers, and practitioners identifying as LGBTQ+ use a range of craft materials and processes to explore their identity and queerness. Find the book on Amazon (international) or Bookshop (US).

Exhibitions

Discover these ceramic exhibitions that were recently featured in Ceramics Now.

• Magdalena Suarez Frimkess. Organized by Shio Kusaka at David Zwirner, Los Angeles
• Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield
• Marte Johnslien: Fotofobia at Galleri Riis, Oslo

What’s on View

A selection of ceramic exhibitions currently on view around the world.

1. Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes at Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY
2. Barnaby Barford: We Are Where We Are at David Gill Gallery, London
3. MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA
4. New Generation – Passion for ceramics at Keramiekcentrum Tiendschuur, Tegelen
5. Ranti Bam: Sacred Groves at South London Gallery, London
6. Yves Malfiet: Olé Désiré! at Erasmus House Museum, Brussels
7. Steven Edwards: Soft Geometry at Vessel Gallery, London
8. Andreas Tesch: Future Fossils at Museum Art.Plus, Donaueschingen
9. Nanni Balentini: Interspaces at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
10. Earthworks: Evolution at The Umbrella Art Center, Concord, MA

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Featured image – Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes at Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY

Christine Coste (b. 1965) is a visual and performance artist based in Pélussin, Southern France. Her practice moves between ceramics, drawing, and performance, exploring the body through an ongoing exchange between these fields. Between 1991 and 2001, she attended live model classes led by ceramicist Nicole Giroud at the Paris Ateliers des beaux-arts. In 2001, she established her own independent ceramic studio in Paris. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and regularly participates in residencies and exhibitions internationally.

Coste’s work addresses fragmentation and hybridisation, with human and animal forms merging into ambiguous figures. Faces are often obscured, suggesting bodies in states of transformation, encounter, and shifting identity.

“Around the issue of the body, Christine Coste works on the interweaving of three specific plastic fields: ceramics, drawing and performance. Her work is an incessant coming and going between these territories. Whatever the medium, the forms complement, blend and extend in such a way as to provoke disturbing points of view and perspectives for the viewer. Rarely faces, except as hooded or buried, the expression being made by the movement itself, whether in the drawings, or through the articulation of the ceramic sculptures. The volumes are fluid, covered with a kind of weft or graphic mesh that she works with oxides, or even with transfer, giving the illusion of a second skin, sometimes even close to a down or an animal shell. It is of course a question here of metamorphoses, mutations, encounters and fusions at the heart of the living world. It is a question of body and sensuality, not to say sexuality, so much the sculptures with carnal contours seem animated from the inside, and endowed with an undeniable organic power.” Text by Jean-Marc Dimanche, 2022

Visit Christine Coste’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Faux-semblant (False pretense), 2024-2026

À rebours (Backward), 2026

Christine Coste: À rebours (Backward), 2026

Exhibition at the CCCLB / Contemporary Ceramics Centre of La Borne, La Borne, 2026

“We are in the smoking room of a grand house; the man has left the room. Only the acrid smell of cigar smoke mingled with cold sweat lingers. A torn club chair sits in the centre of the room. On the wall, a ghostly landscape screams the silent story it conveys. Opposite me there is a little girl watching me. Her stocky build, her head tucked into her shoulders, her stubborn expression reveal a strong animalistic quality, immediately offset by the innocence of her porcelain complexion. Using her chubby fingers, she turns me around so that she can see my face. Her beautiful, deep, dark eyes stare into mine. She tells me about her secret world of steep paths passing through forests, thickets, couch grass and broom. Her world is populated by creatures with the heads of dogs, flies and crows, and the bodies of vipers, spiders and jellyfish. Her enormous, solitary world overwhelms and destroys her. This world she does not understand, yet has lived through, the world of incest given shape and substance by the adult she has become, and who I am.”

Photos © Pascal Vangysel

Christine Coste: Faux-semblant (False pretense), 2024-2026

Faux-semblant series is taking shape in my new studio. This place is located close to the rural territory of my roots and my buried childhood sensations. The mountains, the forests, the fields now punctuate my daily life. I see specific lines there, a grandiose horizon. I let myself be crossed by the touch of mosses, stones and bark. From this, new materials and colors are born to envelop the hybrid forms that I sculpt.

Captions

• Faux-semblant n°4, 2024, Stoneware, 14x45x36 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°2, 2024, Stoneware, 14x36x28 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°1, 2024, Stoneware, 31x20x40 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°3, 2024, Stoneware, 29x23x45 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°5, 2024, Stoneware, 39x33x45 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°6, 2024, Stoneware, 60x33x46 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°7, 2025, Stoneware, 29x40x54 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°8, 2025, Stoneware, 29x17x49 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°9, 2025, Stoneware, 33x17x49 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin
• Faux-semblant n°10, 2026, Stoneware, 26x35x74 cm. Photo © Vincent Noclin

You’re at a party, or some similar gathering that mixes old friends with strangers, and one of the new people finds out that you are an artist. Their face lights up, and they ask, “Oh! What kind of art do you do?” … What do you say?

Do you say, “I am a painter,” or “I am a sculptor,” affixing your identity to the type of work that you make? Do you say shyly that you “work with” plaster or found objects, transferring the focus of the conversation to your favorite media, making it the star? Maybe you feel more like a craftsman and you answer that you’re a potter or a carpenter. Does your answer change depending on who’s at the party and who’s asking the question? Maybe you’re in a room full of academics, professional “philosophizers,” and you take a more appropriately philosophical approach. You say, in earnest seriousness, “I investigate the meaning of life and what it means to be human through material exploration.” Wow, what a grad school answer.

As we grow as artists, as we explore and learn more about ourselves and about the world, how do our answers change over time? How do our answers change as we change?

I fell in love with clay my last semester of undergrad as an art student. Photography, which was the focus of my major, was fun, quick and mechanical. Painting required patience, and, as many painters will relate, many times I would pass the threshold of diminishing returns to the point of ruining what was a perfectly good painting half an hour ago. Working with clay was satisfyingly difficult, and I was satisfyingly good at it. Clay is needy, tempermental, requires hand/eye coordination, mind/body connection and a deep technical and material knowledge to become a master. Unlike painting, clay has a limit and is only workable within a predictable time frame. Clay also requires a stubborn, never quit personality, which I have in spades.

My thirst for knowledge led me to develop my own glazes and clay bodies, and for a long time, I was almost more interested in the chemistry of ceramics than the forms I was making. However, I loved making pots designed for specific uses: a short, fat whiskey tumbler, a tall graceful lemonade pitcher, a casserole, a teapot. I was deeply invested in function and had many competitive studio conversations about the perfect handle, the perfect lip, the perfect glaze.

There is a blue collar pride common amongst potters, even those who climbed the ivory tower of academia. This pride seems eerily similar to that of doctors who, in their confidence, know that their vocation contributes value to the community. Potters make objects that become an integral part of another person’s life, the object through which one is able to nourish themselves or their loved ones. Interestingly, there is a common phenomenon that potters who go to grad school will evolve into conceptual artists to the chagrin of their studio friends and community members. Many of us succumb, myself included.

Early in my first graduate experience in an integrated arts program, (a program where students choose two or more media for the focus of their thesis), I was meeting with my ceramics advisor, finding narrative threads in work made prior to grad school, and I showed her something that I called Of ering Bowl. When I was in my late 20’s, amongst my extended family, we lost five dear loved ones within five years. Understandably, we were hurting. One summer at the end of this dark period, the family gathered for a healing reunion at a beach off the coast of Georgia. The week before the trip, I made a large pinched bowl out of a single lump of clay, burnished the surface smooth, and pit fired the bowl so that the outside was softly gleaming with smokey patterns of maroon and rich charcoal black. After joining my family at the beach, on one hot afternoon, we gathered in the living room of the cabin, and wrote notes to our dear departed, selected flowers, and placed the notes and flowers as gifts into the bowl. We drove to the beach and stood in a circle, all holding the bowl, our hands overlapping, and then someone, I don’t remember who, said a prayer. Then we walked, as a processional, down to the ocean where we released the bowl with its gifts into the waves.

The physical object, the bowl and its gifts, have probably by now been pummelled to powder by the waves and the abrasive sand. I like to think that particles of the bowl have reached distant shores, and something that I labored lovingly over has been dispersed across the globe. All that is left is a series of photographs that I took on the day, documenting the experience.

My advisor recognized Offering Bowl as more than a simple pit-fired pinched bowl. This, she said, was performance art. While I agree with her insight that the piece is more than its physical construct, I disagree with her categorization. Looking back, I see this work as a grief ritual, and my mind places it separately from my art practice. However, her observation opened my eyes that I could belong to a world of art beyond the functional ceramic vessel, and made me realize that I had already been exploring that world unknowingly.

The first time video entered my work was in the year before I started that grad program – within the year before this conversation. I collaborated with a studio neighbor for a group show, “The Art of Tea.” Potters absolutely love tea accessories. We love teapots and teabowls seemingly more than tea itself. For the show, a studio mate made an enormous teacup sculpture, the size of a large punch bowl, filled it with water and placed a goldfish inside. (The goldfish was only present for the duration of the opening reception, then it went back to its aquarium home.) I made a black and white video to accompany the teacup. Against a black backdrop, I recorded a teapot pouring steaming hot water into a glass bowl. When projected, the bottom of the video, the water pouring into the bowl, landed on the surface of the water in the teacup. The rest of the video, the teapot pouring its long stream of water from above, landed on the wall behind. Rising steam filled the frame. The sound of making tea was played from a speaker nearby.

The moving image of the steam and the splashing water in the video reflecting on the surface of the water in the teacup created a bouncing, layered, mesmerizing visual phenomena in the gallery space. This sparked an excitement to play with projecting video onto translucent materials and changing the atmosphere of the gallery space with steam or fog. And yet, I still considered myself a potter.

Over the intervening years, I made many video+object installations, some with multiple projectors and videos, some incorporating fired and unfired clay, some with natural materials, some with translucent materials, but all of them incorporated some functional ceramic item: pinched bowls strewn on the floor, cracked bowls dripping from melting ice, unfired earthenware bowls disintegrating under water drops. My making seemed to grow out of a need to share and nourish others. The pinched bowl represents this concept in its most basic form.

Within this integrated grad program, I was able to follow that altogether human innate, insatiable curiosity that led me to experiment with ceramic figure sculpture, lithography, fabric installation, and combining traditional with digital photographic processes. This varied experience has led to success in the highly competitive and volatile academic job market, and I’ve been able to swerve into unexpected roles, teaching a range of topics from ceramics to photography, sculpture to lithography, video and sound production to life drawing. Sharing my enthusiasm for all of these media with students has been some of the best experiences of my life.

Before completing this program, however, I transferred to a larger ceramics-specific program, where I was encouraged to de-center the pinched bowl from my work. My new advisor considered the addition of the functional object to an installation an unnecessary crutch, as if I was fearful of digging into a deeper layer of meaning. This encouragement opened my imagination to different forms, and for the forms to be inspired by the videos that I was recording as I wandered the wild areas of coastal Massachusetts, my camera, tripod and sound recorder strapped in a pack on my back.

As installation art is temporary, like Offering Bowl, after the work is taken down, it only exists as it is documented. I began making photographs and videos of these installations, adding production qualities to the videos, and posting them to the digital world, considering the photos and videos themselves as separate art pieces, and as such, they became more and more sophisticated. This led to unexpected directing/producing opportunities. Lately, I have begun winning grant awards for film proposals.

Frankly, this blows my mind a bit. Little by little, I have begun to allow my film work to stand on its own, separate from the making of an object, but this has not been easy. This month, at a screening, I handed each person a small earthenware pinched bowl filled with salt water as they entered the viewing space. Some viewers got it, some didn’t. It was a nice touch, but it wasn’t necessary. The viewers who didn’t understand were a bit stressed by this puzzle, and I began to ask myself, why did I feel that these little bowls were so necessary to their experience. For some, being handed a little bowl was a personal, intimate surprise that connected them physically to what was being shown on the screen. To others, the confusion detracted from the experience. Were the bowls a crutch, as my advisor indicated years ago? Or are they an integral part of my artistic psyche, unable to be suppressed?

This summer, a ceramics colleague requested help making a documentary video of his art and practice, and when editing the credits at the end of the film, I had to think long and hard about how to title myself. “Ceramicist” didn’t seem appropriate since my role in the collaboration was to direct and produce. But trying out every other title, like “video artist” or “director,” seemed too limiting to the rest of my studio research, and left out my experience with clay.

There seems to be a common pride amongst all ceramicists, both functional and sculptural, in the ability to succeed with such a demanding material. Like a cowboy on the trail, we brag: “I had to baby a gas kiln all night and didn’t get any sleep.” “I’m formulating a glaze that runs a little bit but not too much and doesn’t clump at the bottom of the bucket.” “I like to stoke my anagama wood kiln with both oak and pine every three minutes for a full five days.” (All of these quotes are paraphrased from real, recent conversations.) Some potters relish in tossing their discards onto a “cry pile” out by the woods for some archeologist in the distant future to discover.

I think this is why I’m so averse to disavowing my ceramics background. It’s a matter of wounded pride – we earn our stripes every time a piece busts in the kiln, or days into building a carefully balanced sculpture, we bump the table and it falls over and either squishes or shatters, depending on long its been out of the plastic, or when we absolutely love the form we just made but the choice of the wrong glaze ruins it and now we hate it. Just so earned is the satisfaction when the glaze comes out of the re-fire just right, you start again and the new sculpture is even more elegant than the previous one, and you take those busted pieces out of the kiln and make a kick-ass avant garde base for your next juicy piece.

So how do I answer the question now when I’m asked, “what kind of art do you do?” Well, you can find my pots in galleries around the country. You can find me cracking jokes at the local university’s figure drawing club most Friday nights, india ink and bamboo brush in hand. You can find me in the woods recording the rain dripping off of the leaves as they change color this fall, and you can find me in the university’s kiln room, glowing with pride and red-faced from the heat as I pull out a juicy, luscious thrice-fired sculpture from the too hot kiln a little too early.

What I’m saying is, find me at the party, stranger, and I’ll tell you.

Heather Jo Davis is an artist, educator and author working in upstate New York.

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Marte Johnslien: Fotofobia is on view at Galleri Riis, Oslo

Featuring a collaborative work with Julia K. Persson

April 16 – May 23, 2026

Photophobia is the medical term for extreme sensitivity to light. The condition is associated with visual disturbances, migraines and a longing for darkness. The exhibition Fotofobia explores the white pigment titanium dioxide as a catalyst for the penetrating light that the white surfaces of modernity reflect.

Johnslien highlights material transformations based on Norwegian minerals and makes visi ble the alchemical principle that all substances contain a seed of their opposite. In the white surfaces there are traces of a dark, material origin. A wave consisting of 800 small porcelain combustion boats, filled with an equal number of variations of titanium dioxide glaze, mean der through several of the gallery’s rooms, and the phases of the moon rise above the gallery’s longest wall. In spiral-shaped ceramic towers, glaze flows in delicate bands from its origin in the ilmenite stone. A photographic print from glass negatives of microscope photos found in Tita nia’s old laboratory transports us from the mine in Sokndal to the cosmos.

When titanium dioxide is used in ceramic glaze, the chemical composition of the pigment changes, and it loses its shimmering whiteness, and sometimes its opacity. The wall installation with 133 ceramic shingles, developed and executed in collaboration with research assistant and artist Julia K. Persson, shows titanium dioxide’s diverse potential.

Also on view will be the series Descend and Dwell from 2023-26, which comprise tablets with motifs inspired by alchemical laboratory work and reproductions of Kronos Titan’s advertise ments and visual identity from 1918 to the late 1950s.
Titanium dioxide has traveled invisibly in the modern world in the form of paint, varnish and dye in architecture, packaging, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics – in short, in all white or bright objects we surround ourselves with. The pigment’s origins can be found in the Norwegian chem ical industry, Titania and Titan Co (later Kronos Titan), which was the first in the world to patent the industrial production method for titanium dioxide in 1909, and still is in operation as Nor way’s largest mining industry.

For the past three years, the white pigment and the mining industry’s environmental impact on nature have been the subject of Johnslien’s research through fieldwork, archival research and experiments in ceramic processes. The work has led her into a matter and history that extends far beyond what she believes to be the Norwegian self-conception. Surprising relationships between color, earth and cosmos have formed new ethereal connections for the artist, which she explores in her work with ceramic materials.

Johnslien has also studied Kronos Titan’s advertising program from 1918, with a special spotlight on the work of Atelier E-O led by Eyvin Ovrum, known as one of Norway’s first advertising agen cies. In the work Descend and Dwell, some of these advertisements and logos are reproduced on ceramic tablets. Advertising drawings are often considered to be “of their time”, and have largely escaped critical examination, and Atelier E-O’s advertising drawings for Titan Co circulated in the Nordic countries for 40 years, until the end of the 1950s. Johnslien’s choice to reproduce the drawings in her artwork can be seen as an insistence on the artists’ part years, until the end of the 1950s. Johnslien’s choice to reproduce the drawings in her artwork can be seen as an insist ence on the artists’ part that we see this visual material as part of Norwegian industrial history.

The exhibition Fotofobia marks the end of the artistic research project TiO2: The Materiality of White, 2022-26, at the Department of Arts and Crafts, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Mar te Johnslien would like to thank her collaborator and assistant Julia K. Persson, students who have participated in the MoW group, workshop master in ceramics Knut Natvik and colleagues at the Department of Arts and Crafts. She would also like to thank her collaborator Ingrid Halland in the sister project NorWhite, and co-researchers Tonje Haugland Sørensen and Helene Engnes Birkeli. Thanks to Maiken Stene and Hans Edward Hammonds at Velferden Sokndal scene for contemporary art for valuable collaboration. Thanks to Hege Steen Langvik and Marianne Løken at Østfoldmuseene. Thanks to Tegneseriemuseet. Thanks also to Titania and Kronos Titan for visits to the factories and for donations of materials for the project.

The project is supported by the Program for Artistic Development, the Directorate for Higher Education and Competence and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

For more information, please visit www.tio2project.com

For more information about Julia K. Persson, who has collaborated with Johnslien on one of the exhibition’s works, see www.juliakpersson.se

Contact
info@galleririis.com

Galleri Riis
Arbins gate 7
NO-0253 Oslo
Norway

Images courtesy of the artist and Galleri Riis, Oslo. Photography by Adrian Bugge.

Sarah Gross grew up in a small apartment in densely populated New York City, often finding herself pressed up against strangers on the crowded train. This experience informed the way she looks at the world and relates to others, with genuine curiosity—and caution. Her work explores physical closeness, emotional distance, and the discomfort and longing that results from that tension.

Sarah shows her work nationally and internationally and is included in numerous collections including the U.S. Department of State, The University of Costa Rica, and the Shiwan Ceramics Museum in Foshan, China. She earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA from Carleton College. She has taught ceramics in various institutions around the US, and completed artist residencies at c.r.e.t.a Rome, Green Olive Arts, Morocco, Greenwich House Pottery, Grand Valley State University, and the Lawrence Arts Center. Sarah is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.

“Closeness may not establish intimacy, but it can fascinate and repel. I grew up in New York City, always sharing space with people I did not know. The contradiction of physical density and emotional distance made me feel simultaneously alienated by and enamored with millions of strangers. I explore this conflict by making work that manifests invisible dividers and destabilizes familiar relationships, making the unknown known, and the known unknown. Inviting and forbidding, my work addresses issues of power, desire, vulnerability, and visibility. Through it, I disrupt familiar ideas about gender roles, sacred and domestic space, and our attempts to influence the gaze of others.

I make art that unsettles the viewer’s perspective. Obstructions and openings confront the viewer, creating spatial and visual relationships that shift and disorient. I create encounters where the viewer must question how they fit into the structure, making the act of looking more self-aware. Scale, intimacy, and the body of the viewer are fundamental considerations. I use pattern, repetition, and accumulation as tools to engage the viewer’s eye and refer to historic tilework and sacred architecture.

I am fascinated by the ways we project our values and act out our aspirations through so many of our activities—including how we dress, how we spend money, and how we decorate our homes. Floral arrangements, garlands, and gardens have become sites of inquiry for me as I consider popular hobbies taken to extremes. My most recent work explores ideas of fertility, abundance, sexuality, and status by covering surfaces with vegetal forms. These sculptural pieces are embedded with layers of desire and discomfort.”

Visit Sarah Gross’s website and Instagram page.

Featured work

Installation Works, 2016-2023

Plant-Inspired Works, 2022-2023

This installation offers a space for meandering and contemplation. It is inspired by the geometric tilework of Islamic architecture, pays tribute to the artisans of handmade ceramics, and treats blue and white ceramics as carriers of ideas. The visual tradition of blue and white ceramics developed through an exchange between the Middle East and China, and has taken on many forms and embodied many geographic identities. Allow your eye to drift from the individual forms to the larger form, from independent pattern to interconnected pattern and experience the lack of resolution. I invite viewers to explore the work and fill the voids they see.

My modular ceramic installation, Consumption, simulates a red carpet, like those seen at celebrity and VIP events. Upon closer inspection the velvety surface of the “carpet” is revealed to be over 700 tiles covered with casts of my fingertips. The sumptuous surface draws you in with associations of larger-than-life glamour but then suddenly becomes uncomfortably familiar and human.

The modularity of this work allows me to respond to different installation sites. Situated in a the space of a gallery, this piece is an examination of the spectacle of the art world. In any location, Consumption creates a space that speaks of status, longing, vulnerability, and power.

This piece is at once brick, tile, and textile simulacrum. Crudely molded clay as elegant classical ornamentation. I sourced the original curtain image from an overstock.com “sheer window scarf” that comes in 21 colorways. Taken all together, this piece speaks of decadence and decay over time.

“Fall in Line” emphasizes the tensions that exist between the inherent uniformity of mass-produced everyday materials and the individuals who use them. The overall form is geometric and brutalist with a glaze designed to mimic concrete. Casts of identical stony bathtub faucets project from the wall, each dripping with a bright yellow tassel, creating a cascade of toxic-looking silk.

Captions

• Continental Drift, 2016, stoneware, glaze, decals, wood, Dimensions variable, each unit 2”x7”x6.5”, Photo credit: Rachel Crowl (first two images) and Aaron Paden (images 3-8)
• Consumption, 2018, talc body casting slip, glaze, 2”x36’5.5’, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Untitled (Curtain), 2020, earthenware, 88”x60”x12”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Fall in Line, 2018, talc body casting slip, glaze, tassels, 36”x8.5’x10”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden

This piece references classical architectural ornamentation such as ancient Greek and Roman garlands and wreaths, and the bas-relief ceramics of the Della Robbia family of sculptors in the Italian renaissance. Molded with a clay that releases soluble salts over time, this piece simulates the patina of old flowerpots left to weather in the garden.

Alternately hopeful and despairing, Festoon changes as you move around it. Stylized fruit forms appear black and lifeless from one side, and glow with color from the other. It references classical architectural ornamentation such as ancient Greek and Roman garlands and wreaths, and the bas-relief ceramics of the Della Robbia family of sculptors in the Italian renaissance. Fertility, victory, and abundance clash with drought, climate change, and loss. A bluebird, hidden in plain sight, rewards those who take the time to look.

The wreaths is a symbol of cyclical time and changing seasons. This series of four wreaths is features four seasonal harvests: oranges in winter, tomatoes in summer, squash in fall, and artichokes in spring. The wreaths appear austere and stony from one angle, and shining with vibrant color when viewed from the other side.

Captions

• Festoon (Winter), 2023, earthenware, 29.5”x62”x10”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Festoon, 2023, stoneware, glaze, 29.5”x62”x10”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Harvest Wreaths, 2023, earthenware, glaze, each approximately 19”x19”x5”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Basket, 2023, stoneware, glaze, 14”x12”x14”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Dilated Flowerpot, 2023, earthenware, glaze, 5.75”x17.5”x17.5”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Flowerpot, 2023, earthenware, glaze,11.5”x12.5”x12.5”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• March to November, 2023, earthenware, 37.5”x37.5”x5”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Portrait, 2022, earthenware, handmade rope and tassel, 47”x8”x8”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• The Performer, 2022, earthenware, glaze, rayon, 47”x8”x8”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Urn, 2023, earthenware, glaze, 9”x11”x10”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Vanitas #3, 2022, stoneware, glaze, 14”x14.5”x14.5”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden
• Vanitas #1, 2022, earthenware, glaze, 11”x13”x11”, Photo credit: Aaron Paden

Nina Malterud has dedicated more than five decades to ceramics and crafts. Many of those years have been spent in the studio, but also quite a few in boards and in the educational system––advocating for her profession and partaking in shaping directions for the Norwegian crafts field and artistic research.

Her own artistic practice has covered cups and bowls, human-sized jars, and tile commissions for public space. Over the years, she has left both dishes and large-scale work behind, to focus on intimate formats that accommodate her experiments in glazing and firing. The control that was once put into drawings and patterns, is now moved to other parts of the making process––not least into decisions of what to keep and what to let go of. What has remained constant is earthenware, a devotion sparked by ceramicist Lisbeth Dæhlin (1922–2012) whom Malterud first assisted and continued to have several collaborations with.

During the past four years, the artist has worked on two large projects that invited for research into her own archive and the history of the Norwegian crafts scene: A retrospective solo exhibition at Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes in Bergen in 2022 and the Norwegian Association for Craft Artists’ 50th anniversary exhibition at Lillehammer Art Museum in 2025–26. After completing the curatorial work for the anniversary exhibition, An Impatient Desire, Malterud has focused on her solo exhibition at Hå Gamle Prestegård on the south-west coast of Norway. Accompanying the exhibition, is a catalogue titled Glaze Stories.

Marthe Yung Mee Hansen: I would like to start at the beginning––how did you start working with ceramics?

Nina Malterud: I was young and I decided to apply for the National College of Art and Design in Oslo¹ and got accepted. Ahead of this I had spent quite some time working with materials and form in different ways. Applying for art school simply felt like the natural thing to do if you were interested in working with your hands creatively. As I was only twenty years old, there were many coincidences involved in why I ended up doing ceramics specifically. The ruling approaches and tendencies in the study programme at the time seemed a bit outdated. We, the students, asked for more focus on materials, process and artistic possibilities, rather than the older ideas of applied arts. Still, we had a very good professional environment there. My close fellow students were a community that I still draw upon as a ceramicist, and it probably contributed a great deal to the fact that I continued afterwards.

However, after three years of studying, I took a year off to think things over. It felt like an unclear subject and profession––what exactly were we being educated into? During this break, I got a job as an assistant in ceramicist Lisbet Dæhlin’s studio and from then on, I was absolutely sold. It was like a dream that I did not know I had until then. Not only the making itself, but also the life in the studio––the whole rhythm of it and the atmosphere. Lisbet was a very welcoming and charismatic person to be around, humble and highly professional. She must have been around fifty at the time, so in my eyes she seemed old and wise, with lots of experience. After my time there, I thought “okay, this is it” and I started my own studio practice at Frysja in Oslo². It is a wonderful place. I stayed there for twenty years before I got the job in Bergen.

Let’s touch upon this part of your career too. Between 1994–2010, you worked full time in academia. First, as a professor in ceramics at the Art Academy in Bergen³, then as rector for the whole institution 2002–2010, and later as part-time adviser in research, teaching, and particularly the PhD programme in artistic research. What about this work made you dedicate so many years to it?

At the time I became a professor at the Academy in Bergen, I had already wanted to teach for some time. I felt like I had a certain talent for conveying ideas, contextualising and organising. However, I was not prepared for educational politics. I thought I was going to teach ceramics for six years, but the field was being reshaped by several merging processes into new academies of the arts in the 1990s. Additionally, this was a very tough time for crafts. The wave of theory in fine art was in many ways devastating for crafts within the academic institutions. It was being ridiculed.

What I learnt from that period was to listen to and take part in discussions that were not necessarily within my original field, and this broadened my perspectives enormously. Especially when we started the joint fellowship programme⁴ in 2003 with all the art forms. I found it incredibly interesting to step out of the craft–fine art divide and to hear what others thought about art, for instance in the fields of dance and film.

In 2002, I was asked to run for the position as rector for fine art, crafts and design. Back then it was done through elections. There was not a lot of competition for the position and to be honest I was not particularly motivated at first. But the leadership had been very male dominated, and I had around thirty female ceramics students and I felt like I had to show them that we could also do this kind of job. That was my motivation––to contribute to balance this out. I worked myself into it, and I found the challenges about adapting national large-scale education policies to the arts interesting. I discovered that it is more enjoyable to take part in decision-making than to be decided over. And of course, I was not doing it alone––I had good colleagues and staff by my side.

You have said that it was not a given that you would return to work with ceramics after this break. What made you decide to come back to it?

I suppose I did have some desire to return. But also, what else was I going to do? I was tired of working with leadership and organisational work, and the language that followed. Then, someone convinced me to apply for an exhibition space at Kunstnerforbundet⁵. I had exhibited there on four occasions between 1975–95 and it is and has always been a well-renowned institution. When I got that exhibition spot, I had something concrete to work towards. In some ways I had to start afresh, like asking colleagues how things work with transport and other practical things. But a lot returned quickly––those bodily routines of producing work do not disappear. I had about a year to prepare for the exhibition and luckily, I found a fantastic studio where I still work today.

In 2022 you had a large-scale retrospective exhibition at Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes in Bergen. In the exhibition, Material Statements, you presented works from 1970s up to the present. Projects like that provide an artist the chance to look back at one’s practice over the years. Can you tell something about this process, and were there in retrospect any projects that held special importance?

There were definitely some things I found not to be particularly relevant anymore and I must admit that I deleted a number of images before the retrospective exhibition. The pieces themselves were long gone––destroyed or thrown away years ago, but there were bits of it that I did not want anyone digging up again. So, I edited the history quite a bit.

A lot of the findings in my own archive overlaps with the history of the Norwegian crafts field. In the 1970s there was a flourishing of crafts in Norway. It was an extraordinary working environment at Frysja and in the Norwegian Association for Craft Artists⁶. As an artist, it was a tremendous stimulus, and I truly believe that we spurred each other on. We organised workshop sales where we, as members, could make something one day and show it in public the next. In this way, we did not have to wait for years for a slot in a gallery programme. A lot of the activity back then was done through very direct action, which gave everything great momentum. When I worked towards the exhibition at Kode, I though a great deal about that––about how much energy there was.

One highlight was the exhibition at Nordenfjeldske – The National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Trondheim in 1989, with Lisbet Dæhlin, Beth Wyller and me, titled Blåleire [Blue Clay]. We had the entire large hall, about 400 square metres. The three of us arrived a few days ahead of the opening without any concrete plan for how to install the exhibition apart from a few obvious wall pieces. We did not have any specific display in mind and ended up placing many works directly on the floor, distributed around the space. And it turned out quite successful. Several of the collaborative projects between Lisbet, Beth and I were like that. We worked well together, with both our similarities and our differences.

Even more recently, you got another opportunity to dive into the archives. This time to look back at the larger context and conditions surrounding the start of your journey as an artist. You were invited to curate an exhibition for the Norwegian Association for Craft Artists’ fiftieth anniversary in 2025. The exhibition, An Impatient Desire, opened at Lillehammer Art Museum in December last year. This is your first time curating an institutional exhibition. Can you talk about your experience with it?

Yes, when the association asked me, I realised that I am one of the people who can say “I was there in 1975”⁷. Somehow, I have become a historical figure. I have a deep connection to that period, and I am certain that I would not have become a craft artist without the environment and the energy from back then––the collaboration that pushed us forward.

In the exhibition, I wanted to bring forward work that had been forgotten. Many of the names that were important back then are unknown to younger generations today. I also deliberately included lesser-known pieces by well-known artists. One of the issues is that several museums in Norway have been closed for longer periods of time, so crafts or decorative arts collections have not been consistently on display, meaning that the public have had very little access to the works. This might be one of the reasons why the museums were very cooperative with loans for the exhibition.

Another thing that should be mentioned clearly is that without the journal Kunsthåndverk⁸ we would have very few sources. I went through two decades of issues of the journal (1980–2000) and I am quite sure nothing truly important from the Norwegian craft milieu went unmentioned, whether it be in reviews, interviews or exhibition announcements. Without that archive, the research base would have been extremely limited. There are some books on ceramics and textiles from that period, but I wish someone would write something comprehensive about that whole period now.

What to you hope visitors take away from visiting the exhibition?

I hope visitors will experience the works with an immediacy and that they will be positively surprised. Many of the pieces have a strong formal presence, which I believe make them accessible, also to those without a lot of prior knowledge of the field. The artists possessed, possibly, a different kind of crafting knowledge at that time. The exhibition also includes some types of works that are almost not produced in our field anymore, like textile scarves.

It is possible to track some of the developments that took place around the 1970s by looking at the works. For instance, how many artists began scaling up in size. Like artists working with textile printing, who had used to make models for small industrial production and thereby been restricted to certain sizes and patterns, suddenly had a new sense of artistic freedom. They started making wall-pieces the size of entire doors or gates. This was the case in ceramics too, with large tile works and modules. The public art scheme⁹ also played a part in this––it was not new, but it was significantly updated. So, the shifts between the small and the large scale, as well as the range from items for personal use to public display, are important in the exhibition.

Let’s circle back to your practice. It is more than fifty years since you started working as a ceramicist. Can you describe some of the changes and developments in your practice? Such as differences between early and more recent works. And is there anything that have been consistent throughout the decades?

I think my relationship with time has changed drastically. I decided when I returned to my studio practice that I was not going to let sales be a determining factor. I could earn my living from part-time jobs in art education. In terms of my production, I started firing my works many times. Each firing adds more work to a piece, but for me, it develops more interesting and complex expressions. I also more or less gave up functional ceramics and the demands following that area. Instead, the heritage of bowls and dishes now exists as references in my work.

In the 1980s I made many very large works, big jars and such. When working in this scale, things became very fragile. One mistake and a whole big piece could be ruined. For me, this became too much technique and too little room for experimentation. Later, when I was working as a professor, I made only small bowls, manageable sizes. The important thing for me became: if something fails, it does not have to mean it is a disaster. With small pieces, you can say “all right, that one cracked” or “that one did not become anything. I will try again”. And if it still does not work, you can discard it. The selection process becomes freer with more intimate formats.

Something that stayed consistent, is the clay itself. I have always worked with earthenware and this red terracotta colour. And in my latest works too, I have returned to red, black and white, which is exactly what I started with. When we were in school, Japanese glazes were very fashionable in the ceramics field, but I never truly developed my own connection to this. When I started working at Lisbet’s, she was completely dedicated to the terracotta surface. As I began making my own things, I worked with very simple patterns in black and white. I used to work mostly with clay colours, raw surfaces and clear glaze only for sheen. But in more recent years, glaze has been my primary expressive tool.

As glazes have come to be such a central remedy in your practice, you have included it in some exhibition titles, like your solo show at Peach Corner in Copenhagen in 2024 and your upcoming exhibition at Hå Gamle Prestegård outside Stavanger. Can you say something more about this?

Glaze Stories just came to my mind. It describes some very specific things that I have been working on. The title comes from one time when I had spilled some glaze on my working desk, and then I accidentally placed small tub on top of it. When I lifted it, an intricate pattern appeared underneath. It looked a bit like a floral motif and I thought: “shall I try to recreate this?”. And so, I did, using slightly dense glaze in various thicknesses. The glazes spread in different ways when being lifted at slight angles, and a variety of motifs emerged.

Earlier in your career you were more concerned with patterns and drawing as starting points. From what I have read about your work in recent years, it seems like you have gradually let go of some of the control in your making process.

Rather than letting go of control, I think it is more about shifting where the control lies in the process. For instance, instead of putting the control into a pre-drawn line, it is placed in the choices made along the way––for the order of the glazes, the combinations, the overlaps or the thickness. Then there is another significant form of control, which lies in choosing what to keep and what to give up on. That is a form of control that happens throughout the process. Almost from the first firing, I ask myself: “what could this be? Which direction does it point towards? What is worth keeping or strengthening or make changes to?”

I have often worked in series. For example, in 2012 I worked with flat circles, ovals and rectangles––geometric formats and fixed dimensions. Within those, I would restrict myself: here only black and white, here only certain actions, and so on. But with these series, I experienced at some point that it tipped over into making designs. When I have these moments––when I think “now I know how to do this” ––the nerve disappears. Often the earliest pieces are the best, when the curiosity, uncertainty and tension may be visible. Not always, but often.

The work titles usually emerge when I see what the pieces have become. With whiteout¹⁰ for example, I wanted to explore a kind of minimalism, but if you look closely, there is actually a great deal going on. These motifs are somehow meditative. Some of the more recent works have more tearing and tension––more contrast or even conflict. Also, with earthenware, the material is inherently nature as clay is made from geological processes. So, the possibilities of natural references are somehow already there in the material. However, my best works are abstract, where the narrative lies in the material and the way it is made, not in a declared message.

Information box

An Impatient Desire, The Norwegian Association for Craft Artists’ 50th anniversary exhibition was on view at Lillehammer Art Museum between December 6, 2025 and March 15, 2026.

Nina Malterud’s solo exhibition Glaze Stories is on view at Hå Gamle Prestegård between March 21 and May 24, 2026. A new catalogue will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Nina Malterud (b. 1951) graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Oslo (1971–74) and has worked as an artist since then. From 1994, she was a professor of ceramics at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, and between 2002 and 2010 served as Rector of the same institution. Subsequently, she has held various roles as a senior advisor at both national art academies and at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen, particularly concerning artistic research and PhD education.

She had a solo exhibition at Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes in Bergen in 2022 and in that same year, she was awarded the Ulrik Hendriksen Honorary Prize and Appointed Officer of the Royal Norwegian Order of St Olav. In 2025 she was curator for the exhibition An Impatient Desire at Lillehammer Art Museum, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Norwegian Association for Craft Artists.

Marthe Yung Mee Hansen currently works as an adviser and producer at Norwegian Crafts, and as a freelance art writer. She graduated with a master’s degree in Museology and Cultural Heritage Studies from the University of Oslo (UiO) in 2020 and did her undergraduate studies in Art History and Media/Cultural Studies at UiO and Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea.

In 2024, she was part of the curatorial group for European Ceramic Context at Bornholm and the prize jury for Talente – Masters of the Future organised by Handwerkskammerfür München und Oberbayern. Her texts have been published in Impulse Magazine and the journal Kunsthåndverk among others.

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Captions

• Nina Malterud, photographed by Øystein Klakegg (featured image)
• Bowls, 1975. diam. 15 cm. In the collection of Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• Bowl, 1975. diam. 15 cm. In the collection of Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• Glaze Stories, 2022–23. 22 x 27 cm. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• Glaze Stories, 2022–23. 22 x 27 cm. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• Landscape in Square, 2024-25. 48 x 48 cm. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• Landscape in Square, 2024-25. 48 x 48 cm. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• whiteout, 2024. 55 x 67 cm. Photo: Øystein Klakegg
• Large pots in studio, 1987. Commission for Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Oslo. Photo: private
• Nina Malterud at a workshop at Hallsberg Brick Factory, Sweden, 1997. Photo: private
• Nina Malterud, Material Statements (solo exhibition), Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes, 2022. Photo: Dag Fosse
• Nina Malterud, Material Statements (solo exhibition), Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes, 2022. Photo: Dag Fosse
• Lisbet Dæhlin, Jug on Wall, 1988; Lisbet Dæhlin, Jug, 1989, in the collection of Nordenfjeldske – The National Museum of Decorative Arts; Beth Wyller, House, 1989. An Impatient Desire, The Norwegian Association for Craft Artists’ fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Lillehammer Art Museum, 2025–26. Photo: Camilla Damgård / Lillehammer Kunstmuseum.
• Rigmor Hvoland, Cutting Angels – Under Water, Swimming in Landscape, 1987, in the collection of The National Museum; Gro Jessen, A Three Seen by an Ant, 1994, in the collection of Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes. An Impatient Desire, The Norwegian Association for Craft Artists’ fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Lillehammer Art Museum, 2025–26. Photo: Camilla Damgård / Lillehammer Kunstmuseum.
• From the exhibition Blåleire [Blue Clay], Nordenfjeldske – National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Trondheim, 1989.
• From the exhibition Blåleire [Blue Clay], Nordenfjeldske – National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Trondheim, 1989.
• Works by Lisbet Dæhlin, Beth Wyller and Nina Malterud, for a joint exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen, 1990.
• Lisbet Dæhlin in her studio, about 1990
• Nina Malterud. From the studio, glaze samples. Photo: Elisa Helland-Hansen
• From the studio, glaze samples. Photo: Elisa Helland-Hansen