MonolitH 90
part of the exhibition
Ceramic Momentum - Staging the Object
CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark
11 may - 3 November 2019
Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen’s particular approach to the material clay and its further processing are fundamentally experimental and unpredictable, borne by a strong will to seek out the unintentional and surprising. She is looking for a showdown with fixed ideas about ceramics and is prepared to let herself be inspired from right and left, sometimes with figurative references to objects we all know, sometimes in purely abstract compositions where ‘the story’ is the expression of the actual material (e.g. in the work Nickel Dripping from Heights Unknown from 2013). Or she mixes everything together and revels in an almost anarchistic, deliberate ignorance concerning the expression of the end result.
Pontoppidan inquisitively sinks completely down into the mud and lets the body’s interaction with the material lead the way forward. But it is not an expressive exercise that in itself puts emphasis on the qualities of the clay in a dynamic now. It is rather a searching for new formal possibilities and poetical expressions that are based on a spontaneous sensual
experience of the characteristics of the material just as much as on a visual reading and understanding of the shared recognisable figures that can possibly be found in the works,
experience of the characteristics of the material just as much as on a visual reading and understanding of the shared recognisable figures that can possibly be found in the works,
Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen works assiduously at ensuring all the observer's senses are stimulated in the encounter with the works. She wants the works to meet you with equal amounts of anti-aesthetics and engaging beauty and thereby challenge you in your experience of them. She embraces the errors that arise, creating works that feel both well-known and inexplicable at one and the same time.
Thanks to Danish Arts Foundation
Foto Jeppe Gudmundsen-Holmgreen
