KHiO QuARTerly: 950

Åsa Wellander (1987) is an Oslo based artist, often working with installations and sculptures from free material. Why, you ask? Because it is free. It gives her the freedom to make mistakes and try new things. She used to make moving installations from found and borrowed things but the anxiety to keep the mechanics working made her go back to ceramic sculptures. Instead of creating actual movement, she embeds the sculptures with a static speed and perceived mobility.

A great influence for Wellander is painter Taylor A. White and she sometimes (but only in her head) calls him her muse. She also gets inspiration from old cartoons and wants her objects to look as if they've sprung up from a doodle. She calls the expression 2.5D – placed somewhere between the second and third spatial dimension. She works fast on the verge of collapse, with little time for second guessing. Wellander often circles back to the ever-going loop of life and the donut shape of time, space and all of us.

My artistic practice explores emotion and suppressed expression through clay.
I grew up in a former Eastern Bloc country, where emotions were treated as a kind of weakness.
Something to swallow. Something to hide. Something that could betray you.
That silence lingers.
In my work, I return to what was not said.
To generational trauma, to affect, to modern femininity, to memory —
to the human need to leave a trace, even when taught to disappear.
Clay becomes a site of confrontation.
I press into it, cut into it, reshape it using power tools—
not gently, but with force.
As if the material could remember.
As if it could resist.
As if it could speak.
The Last Fragment of the Iron Curtain unfolds through these gestures.
Not as a fixed object, but as something that still lives on—
inherited, absorbed, carried.
I ask: what remains of the Iron Curtain?
Not the wall itself, but its residue.
It lingers in concrete housing blocks.
In the way people hold themselves.
In the hesitation before speaking.
In the fear of being seen too clearly.
In anger—
muted, internalized,
slowly dissolving in alcohol.

Yana Haaitsma (b. 2002, The Hague) is a visual artist that explores relationships between natural environments and human systems of consumption and control. Working primarily with ceramics, sometimes combined with metal or found objects, her work develops through working closely with materials and the environment she lives in.
Much of her inspiration comes from a sense of wonder for the natural world. Growing up in a coastal city, the sea has always been central to her practice. Since moving to Oslo, she participates in clean-up dives in the fjord, where she collects human-made remnants for her sculptures.
Her recent works combine recycled clay with these collected materials, such as rope and unrecognizable objects, binding or holding the forms under tension. Reflecting on how materials and bodies are shaped by the systems they exist within.

I seek to shift the perception of everyday objects by working with materials that are typically overlooked, discarded, or considered without value. I collect and accumulate mass-produced waste, such as empty toilet paper rolls, soda cans, frozen pizza boxes and bricks, treating them as materials with potential.
Collecting has been part of me since childhood, and my collections carry strong sentimental value. They hold the time, care, and affection invested in them. By altering their form, adding materials, and presenting them in new contexts, I aim to challenge ingrained ideas of utility and disposability. Familiar objects are displaced from their intended function and enter a different system of meaning, where usefulness is no longer the primary measure of value.