Agenda: Leire er i Verdsrommet og i Norden / Clay in Space and in the Nordics

Architect Bettina Køppe has an extensive experience as curator in the field of contemporary objects. In her gallery Køppe Contemporary Objects she cooperates closely with a group of artists who share an interest in the inherent possibilities of materials and the historical qualities associated with traditional crafts and techniques.
Alongside the gallery work, she has been the initiator, architect, and curator of the project 'New Nordic Porcelain Forum' together with Catrine Danielsen and Andreas Rishovd from Kunsthall Grenland. The project has resulted in collaboration between 13 Nordic ceramicists, 4 residencies, 3 exhibitions and a book entitled ‘AfterGlow - New Nordic Porcelain’.

Elisabeth von Krogh (b.1947) is a material-based artist who has had a major impact on the development of ceramic expression in Norway. Throughout an extended career, von Krogh has demonstrated a great understanding of the medium as well as a keen interest in the development of form using clay as material.

Ceramics is often associated with the home, and particularly to cooking and storing things. The function of the objects, however, has become increasingly less important during Elisabeth von Krogh's artistic practice. In the beginning she produced both vases, bowls, and plates – all containing a utilitarian function. Von Krogh gradually abandons this focus and instead, the development of the overall form becomes central. She focuses on various themes such as the sea and the earth, and large pots as optical illusions of themselves, resulting flattening of the pots’ form.

Elisabeth von Krogh has exhibited nationally and internationally both in solo and group shows, in the exhibition retrospective/prospective at Hauger Kunstmuseum the width of von Krogh's artistic career is highlighted through the decades of her career.

From the tekst From Function to Fine Art: Elisabeth von Krogh and Her Vessels of Art by Jorunn Veiteberg.

By treating the motif of the vessel as the main focus for her artistic practice, Elisabeth von Krogh has concentrated on something that represents her roots both professionally and as a human being.

Jaea Chang is a Helsinki-based ceramic artist from South Korea, focusing on contemporary ceramics. With a background in the graphic design field, she has transitioned her role into the art field as a ceramist, following her interests in crafts. Her main focus is on handmade aesthetics delicately handled in materials. Her ceramics often evoke warm and soft feelings with fabric-like forms. In the slow process of ceramic production, she finds significance in the knowledge gained through experience and creativity.

Michael Geertsen works are, among others, represented at the Metropolitan Museum, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and MAD, all in NYC, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Designmuseum Denmark in Copenhagen.
Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions at Bornholm’s Kunstmuseum, Trapholt Kunstmuseum, Hjorths Fabrik, Galerie Nec in Paris and Kunsthall Grenland in Norway.
He is trained with a potter (apprentice) and have his degree from The Danish Design school in Copenhagen.

Klara Kristalova was born in former Czechoslovakia in 1967 and moved to Sweden with her parents when she was only a year old. She studied at the Royal University College of Fine Art, Stockholm. Kristalova constructs an odd yet familiar world, inhabited by characters who are peculiar, alone, quiet, and perhaps lost—as if they have just escaped from a cruel tale and are waiting for a passerby to show them the way. Made from glazed ceramics, Kristalova’s figures evoke rawness, vulnerability, and humanity. Drawing from Nordic storytelling and traditional myths, the artist seeks to convey basic human emotions such as fear, love, sadness, and guilt, which emerge from her work like memories from our own childhoods. The landscape, though not directly represented, is an essential component of her mental and physical universe, inferred in fragments from the drawings, ceramics, and bronzes that populate the dark and mysterious exhibitions she has unveiled in recent years.

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