Ceramics and Glass

In this exhibition, we encounter works that don’t scream for attention but rather operate on another register – where seeing is shifted towards listening. As a visitor, you move through spaces in which meaning isn’t supplied ready-made, but instead arises in the convergence between body, material and time.

The existential exists here as a quiet presence: what it means to be human in a world in which the tactile and the digital are constantly flowing into each other. Our lives move between the transience of the screen and the resistance of the material. The fragility of glass and the heaviness of ceramics insist on another temporality – another sort of attention than the digital. The hand is not nostalgic, but necessary.

The process begins in a listening – to the material, to the place, to that which is already here. Worn surfaces, weight, marks and residue are allowed to be guiding forces. Through small shifts – light that is refracted differently, objects that are repositioned – situations arise in which the space is felt rather than inferred. The past lingers as traces but is always in motion.

The degree projects are based on an understanding that material is not neutral. It bears its own histories: marks of use, traces of time, remnants of former functions. The artist’s role is not to add meaning, but to respond – to perceive and transpose rather than to formulate and fix.

The process is characterised by testing. Chance is not a strategy, but a fact that breaks in and reshapes. What first appears wrong or foreign is often permitted to remain. In these deviations open new directions, where the work is allowed to become something other than was first intended.

In some degree projects we encounter drawings and stories that move towards the mythical: folk tales, the purifying nail, the forest as a place for transformation. The landscape emerges not as background, but as the carrier of experience – a place where the human and the more-than-human meet. A quiet negotiation is taking place here between the visible and the envisioned, between what can be held in the hand and what eludes form.

For three years, the students have deepened their individual artistry while simultaneously building a theoretical foundation on which complexity is not simplified but kept open. This is evident in how the degree projects move between different layers of meaning without becoming fixated on a single one.

It is an exhibition that doesn’t offer quick answers. It demands time and attention and gives something in return to those who remain – not as clear messages, but as a shift in how we perceive what we already thought we saw.

Jakob Solgren Nordenskiöld and Karin Blomgren

Senior Lecturers in Craft specialising in Ceramics and Glass