By Christina Rauh Oxbøll, Museum inspector

For more than 30 years, it has been of crucial importance that Tommerup Ceramic Workshop has been able to offer professional facilities and a high level of professional expertise when artists had to turn their creative ideas into reality. Just as it is crucial that the potters here have the opportunity to express themselves in larger formats than what is possible in their own kilns. It is in this breadth that the ceramic techniques are constantly maintained on both a large and small scale, just as it is constantly a source of new experiences with the difficult ceramic disciplines.

With the exhibition Large formats – clever hands, another chapter is added to the story of the interaction between Tommerup Ceramic Workshop and CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark. To celebrate the workshop’s unique position as one of the world’s most important hotspots for unique ceramic production, the museum and the workshop have jointly organized a ‘reunion’ between art and technique, inviting some of the most influential artists and potters on the current ceramics scene to create new works . Based on the workshop’s strong connection to Norway, it has become a meeting not only between artists and ceramicists, but also between Norwegians and Danes. The 15 artists who have been assembled in Tommerup over the winter, spring and summer of 2017, together represent a great artistic diversity, and have each been challenged by the techniques mastered by Tommerup Ceramic Workshop. The 15 finished works elegantly show the results of the intensive meeting between the invited artists’ own practice and the workshop’s methods and techniques in the large format. The result is 15 fantastic works, which after the exhibition will be incorporated into the museum’s collection.

René Schmidt is educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Based on computer-generated 3D sketches, he creates sculptures in various materials. He calls his sculptures objects, whether they are made of polyester, stainless steel, jesmonite (an acrylic plaster), concrete or ceramics. They are inspired by shapes and surfaces that he primarily finds in consumer culture and the world of advertising and the industrially designed, created with a view to functionality and consumerism. The works often contain recognizable elements, which, however, on closer inspection turn out to be something else. He disrupts the recognizable by distorting proportions, often through computer-generated fragmentation. Sometimes the surfaces appear cool and monochrome, other times they explode in colour. In his latest sculpture, made at Tommerup Keramiske Værksted, he has created a computer-generated form, cut out of a cardboard model. The crystalline column form has then been shaped in plaster into a mold, in which the work itself is cast in clay. Subsequently, René Schmidt processed the surface with paint in several colors and glazes.

Kirsten Justesen is a trained sculptor from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1975. She works with a wide range of expressions, both in the form of installations, performances and body art, just as she has worked as a scenographer and director. Based on the feminist debate in the 1970s, Kirsten Justesen has frequently used her own body as a starting point for conceptual works that thematize gender politics, while many of her later works deal with the relationship between body, space and language. Through several exhibitions, Kirsten Justesen has re-actualized some of her earlier works, whereby new layers of meaning have been added. So also for this exhibition, where Kirstens Justesen has resumed the sculpture 1999, 3 x WHITE 1:1:1. However, where the starting point for the sculpture from 1999 consisted of three plaster casts of Kirsten Justesen’s naked body, with a box on her head and placed on a cubic plinth made of MDF, the same cast is now used to repeat the sculpture in its entirety in ceramics. In the plaster form of the cast, the sculpture is encased in black stone clay, both the seated, slender female body with the box on her head and the cubic plinth. In the plinth, the artist has inscribed the title: 1 X BLACK 1:1, 3 X 37 MANDETIMER, PA TOMMERUP 2017, KIRSTEN JUSTESEN.

Peter Brandes is an autodidact painter, graphic artist and sculptor who works in continuation of the abstract-expressive tradition. His often dark expressions revolve around religious and mythological subjects regardless of the medium in which he expresses himself. Peter Brandes’ familiarity with ceramics is unique, and the pressing technique has had a great impact on his ceramic production of jars, dishes and figurines. He thinks his painting together with these pressed forms and has developed over the years a fabulous ability to express himself in the intense color scale of the engobes and glazes. With The Potter, Peter Brandes links to a beautiful motif tradition of creating sculptures depicting potters. Inspired by Jais Nielsen’s (1885-1961) monolithic sculpture The Potter, a major work in the collection of CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, Peter Brandes has modeled a tall manly figure, standing and looking down into a jar, which the figure holds with both hands. The final sculpture is made by casting over a plaster model and molding it into shape.

Pernille Pontoppidan was educated at the Royal Danish Academy – Design, Bornholm in 2012, and has distinguished herself with a free and insistent style. In her architectural objects in ceramics, she investigates the connection between structure, demarcation, balance and, not least, the relationship between beauty and ugliness. The objects are complex stacks of different ceramic elements, some roughly modulated up, others squeezed out of a tube, just as materials such as concrete and marble mix and confuse the image. The works often seem like dilapidated building constructions. Or as sumptuous but unhelpful cakes, where the confectioner has not had control over mixing ratios, baking times or textures. It’s all seething and bubbling and on the verge of bursting. Pernille Pontoppidan consciously works with the aesthetics of ugliness as a method to see precisely the beautiful. At Tommerup, she has modeled her architectural sculpture layer upon layer, as a strangely convoluted and labyrinthine building has grown. Here she has created her largest ceramic construction to date, a 1.7 meter high sculpture, where a number of floors rise above each other, each with enigmatic niches and rooms.

Morten Løbner Espersen is educated at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, Duperré in Paris, 1990, og Danmarks Designskole, 1992. He has a great affection for the vessel and container as a ceramic form, which is a source of eternal fascination. This archetypal form that can be empty or full, but will always be loaded with meaning. Morten Løbner Espersens is looking for a minimalistic expression that is anything but perfect. Instead, he has made it his artistic project to refine the glazes, but not as perfect, repeatable surfaces on the ceramic objects. Instead, he seeks the imperfect and uncontrollable through experiments with new chemical combinations in the search of the wild world of glazes. The result is often ceramic objects that move between the fabulous and the tumultuous. To Moon jar. #1990, Morten Løbner Espersen has drawn and measured a large jar shape, which is first turned up on the large turntable, and then modeled and decorated on the surface. The result is an organic, textured surface that can hold up to the maximum of the layer-by-layer of glazes that the artist subsequently applies. The many layers create a special play in the work’s colored surface.

As a ceramicist trained at the Design School in Kolding in 1999, Marianne Nielsen has built her own and completely unmistakable universe of primarily nature’s forms in ceramics. No one like her has an ability to study a radish, the flower of a dahlia or just a single feather down to the detail and recreate it in clay and glaze, almost 1:1. But even though the ceramic lens is set to macro and we get really close, Marianne Nielsen does not copy. Simplification and the interpretation inherent in the processing of an element obtained from nature is a conscious strategy. She “civilizes” the natural and easily perishable in fired clay and the beautiful colors of the glazes into a world of ceramic still lifes. For the convention at Tommerup, Marianne Nielsen has taken up the challenge and created an oversized daffodil in an equally enlarged vase form. The total height is barely 2 metres. With this work, she demonstrates that she is also adept at modeling and glazing a small motif into »Tommerupesque« dimensions. The stem and the long, slender leaves are extruded and subsequently modeled in place in terms of shape, while the daffodil’s head is lifted into place with a crane. The vase in which the daffodil stands is made in slap building technique.

As a visual artist, Magne Furuholmen is a student of the painter Kjell Nupen, 1989-1993. His visual expression is very graphic and inspired by prints, whether he expresses himself in painting, graphics or ceramics. Letters and words characterize his works, and with Magne Furuholmen the letters are charged with several meanings. They carry in themselves visual qualities and properties at the same time that they also form linguistic constructions and statements. Magne Furuholmen is no stranger to large relief works. He writes poetry with words in clay when he stamps letters into the massive blocks. A classical discipline is thereby expanded to approach sculpture and to set a new agenda for the meeting between 2D and 3D. In this work, Magne Furuholmen has taken as his starting point two extruded tubes that, as upright columns, have had “wings” applied to them, whereby they take on an almost anthropomorphic or angel-like character. The artist has modeled them, among other things, by hitting them with wooden planks and by cutting into the surfaces, on which he has made relief prints of words and letters in the clay. One column has a white glaze applied, the other has a bronze glaze which becomes dark metallic after firing.

Andreas Schulenburg is educated at The Jutland Art Academy, 1999, and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 2005. His artistic universe immediately seems playful and fun with its clear cartoon aesthetic with simplified, easily recognizable shapes and bright colors. However, the “bang bang” humor of the comic world becomes caricatured and not so funny when it is blown up to oversized. Everything is thematized here, from the global consequences of human actions such as war and climate change to animal welfare among broilers. One of Schulenburg’s favorite materials is felt, but he also expresses himself in drawing, painting and on film, just as he has often used ceramics to create works with bright colors and sensual surfaces. At Tommerup, Andreas Schulenburg has created an enlarged tableau, on which a 1.5 meter high quill flanks an overturned ink house. From the inkwell, the ink flows over the ceramic scroll, which also forms the base of the sculpture. The expiring ink forms the word Truth, created with a template. In the highly symbolic work, the pen appears white, the inkwell black, the paper/base yellowish and the ink blue, as the surfaces alternate between glossy, silky matte and completely matte.

Ingrid Askeland graduated from the Art Colleges in Bergen and Oslo, 2005. She works with popular and recognizable objects such as beer bottles and beer capsules, which are blown up to oversized. She fills the surfaces with humorous scenes that sometimes touch on nightmarish imaginings, drawn with a brush on the surfaces of the objects. The scenes are both social and self-critical comments. In her work with these unique and personal narratives, she works with the disciplines of modeling and decoration and is hands-on from start to finish in the process.

For the exhibition, Ingrid Askeland has modeled and scaled a classic Danish beer bottle into a 1.5 meter tall sculpture. On a white painted base, she has made a drawing with a brush in black pigment, on which the work is glazed and fired once, while the bottle’s capsule is glossy platinum glazed. The drawing itself is meticulously executed in the black glaze decoration, where an almost surreal scenery unfolds with tree roots, small human figures, larger machines and a huge, angry bird with an elongated intercity train in its beak.

Søren Thygesen was educated at the Design School in Kolding in 1987. From 2000, he has been regularly associated with Tommerup Keramiske Værksted, where he has contributed to the execution of many of the works that have been created in Tommerup. Søren Thygesen is honest, even almost soberly, in his approach to clay as a material. Based on the Danish tradition of brick architecture, he investigates the expression and possibilities of the material when it is processed into spatial installations and sculptural objects. With the red, freshly made tiles, he creates sculptures that both refer to architecture and optical illusions, such as when the hard ceramics suddenly rise from the floor or are shaped by rain. The rigorous and rational material becomes both attractive and surprising in the meeting with the organic. In this work, Søren Thygesen has constructed a hemisphere with a diameter of 1.2 meters from shape-cut bricks. The bricks have the same dimensions in depth and width as ordinary bricks. Using 3D technology, a template has been constructed which defines the correct curvature and cut on each individual stone. The hemisphere rises unglazed with the well-known brick red color like bricks in a red brick house, and can be built into ordinary walls or used in brick coverings.

Behind the artist duo Hesselholdt & Mejlvang are Sofie Hesselholdt and Vibeke Mejlvang, who both graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. They have distinguished themselves with a number of installations that involve different materials such as textiles, leather, photography and ceramics. Characteristic of their works is often the meeting between the humorous and the socially and politically motivated. They like to use strong and easily recognizable symbols, often in a slightly processed version or put into unfamiliar and surprising contexts, whereby new meanings arise. In a number of performances and installations, Hesselholdt and Meilvang have worked with the flag as a motif. In doing so, they question identity and national belonging, among other things by producing Dannebrog in different skin colours. The work Stack of Skin Colored Flags continues this search, presenting here a sculpture consisting of six powerful reliefs lying in layers on top of each other. Each relief is a cast of a Dannebrog flag on a clay slab. The sizes of the reliefs are identical, but their glaze colors are different and relate in terms of meaning to the skin colors of different ethnic population groups. The placement of the reliefs on top of each other gives the sculpture a strong symbolic content and poses the question, who dominates whom? Due to the structure, only the upper relief will appear in its entirety.

Gunhild Rudjord graduated from the Design School in Kolding in 1989 and is the undisputed glaze expert at Tommerup when large and small works need to be realised. No one like her masters the difficult art of converting the artists’ drafts into glazes in harmony with their original wishes and ideas. Gunhild Rudjord also has a large artistic production of her own, where she primarily works with the ceramic archetypes, the dish and the jar. She is a master at decorating the works, where a world of organic figures, flowers, leaf vines and graphic elements creep across the surface. She draws her inspiration from, among other things, Norwegian folk art and Nordic works of art, and not least from Thorvald Bindesbøll’s (1846-1908) powerful ornamentation. One of her characteristics is the way in which she partly lets the glaze define the motif and ornament, partly lets it flow so that the contours of the motif are partially blurred. In this way, the work appears to be in constant transformation and movement, there, right before one’s eyes. For the exhibition here, Gunhild Rudjord again demonstrates her glaze mastery on a 1.6 meter high, slender and resilient jar with a characteristic upper rounding inside for her. Through the special use of setting glaze, the jar’s floral motif intertwines with the ethereal landscape background.

Professor og billedhugger Bjørn Nørgaard er uddannet ved den Eksperimenterende Kunstskole i 1960’erne og har livet igennem søgt at udfordre kunstens klassiske former. Uagtet om det drejer sig om performances, skulpturer, udsmykninger eller grafik, er Bjørn Nørgaard stærkt forankret i og reflekterende på historien, ligesom hans værker ofte også udtrykker samfundskritik. I dag hører han til blandt landets mest anerkendte kunstnere og har blandt andet udformet regentparrets kommende sarkofag. Bjørn Nørgaard har gennem årene skabt en lang række monumentale udsmykninger, heraf mange i samarbejde med Tommerup Keramiske Værksted. Med værket De Røde Hunde har Bjørn Nørgaard igen skabt et værk, der udnytter værkstedet mestring af glasurernes mange muligheder. Op ad en to meter høj organisk bølgende søjle løber modellerede spiralbånd, hvorfra tolv hundefigurer »springer« ud til alle sider. Skulpturen er konstrueret, så den kan fungere som en vandkunst, hvor vandet kan pible ud ad dyrenes munde. Ind imellem hundene ses organiske bladtunger. Ganske typisk for Bjørn Nørgaard har han givet dette nye værk en flertydig titel: De Røde Hunde, der både refererer til dyr, en børnesygdom og socialister.

Bente Skjøttgaard is a trained ceramicist from the Design School in Kolding, 1986. She experiments with the form possibilities in clay and glaze and is known for her very own voluminous expression with organic structures in stoneware. She has created sculpture lakes, gigantic crawling vases and impossible basins that seem to gain weight and tilt under the weight of the clay. In recent years, she has worked to cancel out precisely this in the clay’s inherent heaviness in her series of cloud objects. The cloud as a fleeting, light and intangible phenomenon, which she seeks to give shape in clay and glaze, while at the same time trying to cancel gravity and maintain movement. The objects are built up as organic structures of branch work in stoneware, on which she can experiment with glaze effects. The shapes invite you to let the glaze flow down the object in thick layers or harden in the middle of a movement. Bente Skjøttgaard masters the clay and the chemistry behind it, but likes to bring the experiment out there, where she partially lets go of control and lets the situation prevail. For the anniversary exhibition, Bente Skjøttgaard has created a series of three large branch works, glazed in white color layers. The glazing of the objects took place by hanging them on a fork lift truck to be lowered into a large glazing tub twice.

Per Ahlmann was educated at the Design School in Kolding, 1995. He has been associated with Tommerup Ceramic Workshop since 1987 and, alongside this work, has a significant artistic practice. Per Ahlmann works sculpturally with ceramics in a searching style, where elements seem to be recognizable and yet can be read in pure abstraction. He is not tied to one particular technique, but often mixes the techniques in the construction of his sculptures based on an improvisational and fabulating approach to the material and with the glaze as an important partner. In “The hesitation of all things”, he experiments with the effect of gravity. The main part of the sculpture consists of an extruded tube over four meters long with a diameter of just over 20 cm. With the help of gravity, the tube is curved in a large droplet shape, where the clay in the arch at the bottom comes under maximum pressure and tension. Through a slow drying process, this characteristic shape is maintained, which follows the laws of physics. Subsequently, the other elements of the sculpture are modeled from below.