Something warped and more demanding
A catalogue essay by Love Jönsson

On one of the walls in Gitte Jungersen’s workshop in Copenhagen hang a few curious-looking pieces of sculpture. They have the likeness of organically shaped ledges or miniature landscapes. Their form language, however, is familiar from the protuberances sprouting out of the cube shaped vessels Gitte Jungersen has been working on in the last few years. But in these new wall objects, both the form and its execution have been pushed one step further. The relationship between the sculptural object and the space has changed. While the ceramic boxes in the artist’s earlier production used to create small, clearly defined spaces filled by alien vegetation, these landscape-like wall objects rather function as an appendix in the larger context of the surrounding architecture. Even if the organic ceramic forms are still about the same size as in the past, the impression they impart on the onlooker is now completely new. To some extent, the artist engages here in a game of play with her audience’s expectations. Instead of simply affirming her previous accomplishments, she elects to go on, forging ahead with a novel set of objects. Viewed against her earlier work, Gitte Jungersen’s most recent sculptures mark a move towards another way of looking at ceramics and the places it can occupy.

In retrospect, the just over ten years that Gitte Jungersen has behind her as a ceramic artist seem to be characterised by precisely this kind of reconsiderations—not to say reversals. More clearly than most in the profession, she has shown that she does not want to get pigeonholed to one particular category. She has moved from geometrical to organic shapes, from unique to serial forms, from compact objects to sweeping site installations. But even though these shifts have been drastic at times, they nonetheless chart a course that the artist has been following in her work. The ceramic material and the expressive possibilities it offers form the foundation on which Gitte Jungersen’s artistry has evolved, and like a pendulum movement, moving sometimes closer, moving sometimes further apart, the relation to this basic core in her work has remained. However, bracketing any discrepancies and inconsistencies we may observe in her oeuvre, we are always referred back to her unmistakable starting point—the clay and the glaze. Even in the case of the installations for which she has been using other materials, like the room filled with human hair that was included in an exhibition right after her graduation from the Danish Design School in 1993, one can trace the same fascination for the physical and tactile expressiveness of the material.

While Gitte Jungersen’s work as a rule reflects her devotion to ceramics as a material, it nonetheless frequently suggests a certain distance to the conventional effects and valuation patterns typifying the field . In a group of tall and narrow rectangular vases with accentuated vertical sides from 1996, she allowed the vessel to metaphorically become something of a screen open for projections. Positing the clay this way as a screen, as a flat vertical surface, made the subtly shifting, seductively flowing ash and copper glazes on the vessels almost appear as images. The emphasis on the surface as a potential backdrop for projections undermined the claims to authenticity with which ceramic crafts of this type are often associated. The vessel became a film screen onto which the story of the firing and glazing processes were put on view, the unfolding ceramic drama here disclosed to us as something more akin to a rendering than an unmediated vision.

But it is also in other ways that these vessels provoke a sense of uncertainty about their constitution. They can be used as vases, even as their functional value remains secondary next to their image aspect. Upon closer inspection, one of the vases turns out to be sealed and without an opening, while the sides of another are perforated with holes. Yet, at the same time as their actual functionality is in this manner distorted, the vessels on another plane retain references to functionalism as an historical epoch. The arrangement of the lined up, narrow, flat vessels calls to mind a functionalist housing project with slender, symmetrically ordered flat slab buildings. Taken as a whole, what emerges here is an enigmatic relationship between form and function, body and surface, image and representation.

To twist the concepts in this way is a recurring strategy in Gitte Jungersen’s work process. One of the more obvious examples is given in her long-time undertaking with cube shaped vessels. Already in her first cubes, from the mid-1990s, she allows the sharply delineated, precise forms assume a certain sullied appearance. Thick, dark glazes swell as if in the grip of convulsions, causing them to rise and fall over the cubes and obscure their shape. The glaze surfaces are porous, full of holes like something overcooked; the impression one gets is that a layer of lava from the volcanic underground has formed a drape over the pure geometry of culture.

Returning to her work with cubes at around 2003, Gitte Jungersen once more employed porous, eruptive glazes, if possible now even more densely perforated and ulcerous-looking than before. The range of colours, however, was different. The dark earth tones had for the most part been replaced by radiant hues of bright yellow, pink and green. With their intense colours, the glazes acquired something of an artificial character and appeared far removed from the older boxes, which emanated a sense of weight and gravity. In these later works, the vessels themselves started sprouting out playful protuberances as well. Branch-like features and buds were pushing out of both the in- and outsides, and in some cases coming to completely dominate the geometrical form. If the glaze was previously applied over the clay surface as if something alien to it, it was now instead the surface itself that was suddenly bursting and mutating at whim. However, by simultaneously applying candy-like, artificially coloured glazes, Gitte Jungersen complicated things a little more still.

If the modernist ceramic artists in Scandinavia tended to emphasise the unity of form and glaze, Gitte Jungersen and many others of her generation prefer to point out their divergences. For them, the glaze can be used as something essentially different from the clay, an entity unto itself rather than just a pliant coating. Gitte Jungersen herself describes how, by using bright ready-made pigments, she found a way out of the confines of a training and a tradition in which she had come to feel less and less at home. Having received recognition for her earlier works with ash glazes, she nonetheless found herself viewing the expectations attached by the public to this type of ceramics as an artistic burden. Here, the bright colours of the consumer goods and plastics offered her a way out. At the same time, her organic ornaments were forging a link to an entirely different world—namely nature, one of the traditional sources of inspiration for ceramics. As in other areas of her artistic activity, the relationship between different colour and form elements here can be readily understood in terms of a tension between nature and culture.

The tension we find in many of Gitte Jungersen’s pieces, however, can also be interpreted as an opposition between history and the present. To be sure, linking up with the materials and symbols of contemporary society has already for long been on the agenda of many a crafts artist in our time. The ambition is frequently in evidence in the reworkings of objects or motifs drawn from the world of commercial mass production, with the signs and traces of the new way of life recast upon contact with the often age-old methods and materials of the crafts. The emphasis is laid on the reformulation and reinterpretation—and not only of the present day but also of the historical heritage. How do synthetic colours resonate when put to use in archaic crafts processes? How is the organic form language affected, cloaked in an artificially bright garb?

Gitte Jungersen seeks a close relation with her materials: she challenges them, steers them, but also attentively listens to them. In the case of her colourful glazes, what results is that one, in certain respects well-known content becomes transformed into something else, something slightly warped and more demanding. In these works, the artist adopts a pleasing, ingratiating colour palette and a sensuous form language, while simultaneously undermining the claims of these works to aesthetic beauty by presenting them through broken, ulcerous surfaces. What operates here is a distancing effect, involving perhaps not so much the directness of the onlooker’s physically conditioned experience as the psychological processes of recognition and expectation at work.

Among Gitte Jungersen’s earlier works there are several examples of the kind of critical treatment she has given to issues concerning creative and experiential processes. In 1995 she showed a group of twelve identical cast sculptures. The shape they had in common could be viewed as a highly stylised face with one blank gazing eye. The set, entitled Bastard, consisted of cast pieces moulded from a massive lump of clay that bore marks of rough treatment, such as an impression left by a shoe sole. What those visiting the exhibition were in fact confronted with was a disrespectful human gesture, supplied by a shoe, documented in a piece of clay and reproduced in duplicate cast objects. The fact that the original lump of clay was only present in the form of representations gave rise to a distance between the artist, her work and the audience. And that it was the imprint of a shoe rather than the ceramist’s fingertips that were brought forward rendered only more conspicuous her ironical commentary on the public’s fascination with the unique input of the artist. Here the clay became a stage on which a subtle interplay was enacted between expectation and disappointment—a long way from the sincerity that many still routinely continue to expect from the crafts.

What lies at the core of Gitte Jungersen’s current interests is, in a sense, set design—the architectural space as a setting for the new ceramic wall objects, and the latter as stages for silent dramas. By allowing the organic forms in her boxes from the recent years to depart from their previous foundation and acquire an independent identity of their own, their meaning has also changed. Previously but one party in an expressly dualistic relationship, they have now emerged as actors in their own right. If earlier they could be understood as free variations on a theme that above all stood in opposition to a rigid, underlying primary form, they now appear as worlds unto themselves. They are microcosms governed by their own form-specific logic. Motif-wise, they can be likened to grotesque, vastly magnified molecular structures. However, these often horizontally oriented ceramic objects also lend themselves to interpretation as panoramas of mysterious landscapes. In the earlier pieces in this series, these landscapes were left unpopulated and abstract, giving them the appearance of symbolic stages for wind and light rather than humans. More recently, however, Gitte Jungersen has introduced alien inhabitants into these landscapes – plastic animals and cartoon characters. The ensuing tension between the abstract and the figurative provides one of the many avenues awaiting further exploration in Gitte Jungersen’s art in the coming years.

Love Jönsson is a crafts and design critic and teaches at the School of Design and Crafts at Göteborg University. He is a member of Think Tank: A European Initiative For the Applied Arts.
This essay was originally printed in a catalogue in 2006.

Translation: Rebecca Landmer