Artists: Morten Løbner Espersen - Guido Geelen - Heidi Kippenberg

Clay is one of the best-known and likely one of the oldest materials used by humans. Even today, clay remains indispensable and serves a wide variety of functions. It continues to play an important role in tableware, despite the availability of materials like glass and plastics. The technical possibilities of working with clay are virtually limitless—turning, casting, building, printing, and more. The exhibition Clay presents the work of three ceramicists who build vases using this timeless material.

Espersen, as a ceramicist, skillfully navigates the precarious tightrope between control and chance. He is constantly striving to find the right balance, even though he is uncertain whether his next step will lead to progress or a potentially disastrous fall. Either way, his goal is only to create quivering aesthetic that challenges his own taboos. As a result, he conceives these sculptures that exist at the intersection of reason and emotion, freedom and determinism, order and chaos.

Morten Lobner Espersen's oeuvre echoes the inherent dualities of our human nature.

Guido Geelen
In his sculptures Geelen explores formal and decorative possibilities in great detail, he returned to basics, working with clay just as it is delivered from the supplier: like loaves of bread wrapped in plastic. He decided to use the clay loaves in their most sober form and simply stacked them in criss- cross fashion to create Carl Andre-like ziggurats. Delivered as a ready-to-use malleable material, the blocks of clay are soft enough to stick glass tubes into. The resulting works are Geelen’s most restrained sculptures to date: stacks of celadon-glazed bricks that can be placed on a table and serve as vases for flowers.

Heidi Kippenberg
Inspired by travels to foreign cultures' , incessantly experimenting with masses and glazes, struggling with the setbacks of high reduction firing, Heidi Kippenberg sought a way to combine her ceramic origins with a certain pottery serenity to achieve a less strenuous simplicity. Thus, the slight smoothness and cool perfection of her early pots faded in favour of true ceramic possibilities: From 1973 she produced built and assembled vases in addition to turned objects, leaving turning grooves, cutting, scratching and applying abstract relief decorations, letting surfaces live from the way they were made and breathe through the thinner glaze application, which seemed more natural in its restrained chromaticism. Still later, new shapes keep appearing, stele-like rectangular vases and trapezoidal vases.