What is the Guiding Principle: The Material, the Idea or the Process?
I chose to be a ceramist because clay can be formed, and form is a language. And I sensed I was quite good at it.
Immediately after graduating from Design School Kolding in 1985 I was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen; at the same time I became affiliated with the porcelain factories Bing and Grøndahl and Royal Copenhagen – a period which convinced me to take both the artistic expression and articles for everyday use seriously.
As a trained ceramist clay is my basic material. However, it has taken me in so many different directions that I am not always certain whether it is the material, the idea or the process that guides me. Fundamentally I view my work as an artistic discipline that relates to use, action and expression.
The first years at the porcelain factories became a vital introduction to the possibilities of serial production. The result was the series OLE, comprising kitchen utensils in coloured faience and eating utensils in porcelain and glass. In 1996 I decided to also ‘do the dishes’, and that year I designed the first hand-made examples of a soft rubber bowl with a brush – most likely the most expensive washing up bowl in the world. It was later developed further in collaboration with Normann Copenhagen and launched as an industrial product in 2002. And now that I was in the ‘cleaning business’, I also designed dustpans in polypropylene and brooms with round sticks and pig bristles.
In early 2000 I made a series of hand-thrown dishes, bowls, cups and jugs in red clay and exhibited them at Udstillingssted for Ny Keramik and at Galleri Nørby. Simple and straightforward. Rather like the epitome of ceramics. Over the following years I had more fruitful collaboration with Normann Copenhagen. I also participated in the first initiatives from Muuto, and with Louis Poulsen I made three white monolithic lamps. My contribution to the first Mindcraft exhibition in 2008 was a large bathtub made of rubber – an object that attracted a lot of attention at the exhibition, but which, unfortunately, like many other projects, was hit by the financial crisis.
Maybe that’s why my next contribution the following year became a series of hot water bottles! In connection with the Danish Arts Foundation’s project, Art for Hærvejen (the Ancient Road, a 500 km old cattle trail running through Jutland, now a hiking and biking trail) I designed a special limited-edition Hærvejs rain cloak – a rewarding assignment since it relates to a specific place and not to the whole world.
Over the years many other projects have come up of course. A strong mixture of large and absolutely minor successes.
Having been invited to participate in Mindcraft 2016 I once again sit down at the potter’s wheel. Inspired by early and primitive cultures, which often perceived and expressed everyday objects as animated beings, it has been liberating to rediscover and ‘cultivate’ the being and the body as means of expression. No matter whether the objects are seen as design or handicraft, as new or original, they turned out more fun and more expressive than expected. They quite outshone the simple point of departure.
And when that happens, my thoughts always go back to my time as a student in Kolding and to my teachers, Lisbeth Voigt Durand, Inge Marie Larsen, Peder Rasmussen, Niels Lauesen and many others. They taught me the art of being ‘an eternal student’.
