Marit Tingleff: New Ceramics

About

Often working on a large if not monumental scale, she takes ordinary, domestic items - such as platters and chargers - and elevates them into powerful, sculptural objects. As the curator Sarah Griffin has written:

Marit Tingleff's plate forms are a tribute to the traditions of the design and decoration of ceramics, but their monumental proportions remove them from the realm of function, and conventional making processes. Press-moulded with her feet, these "platters" were suspended vertically on pulleys so that coloured slips could be poured down onto the elaborate multi-layered, slip-painted surfaces from a ladder, and then fired in an industrial-sized kiln. Many years of experimentation with a limited set of clay slip colours has yielded a rich vocabulary of tonal ranges, where decorative motif is not just the additional applied surface but becomes integral to the vessel form.

The landscape is often Marit's starting point for the decoration of her work and she has a particularly painterly approach to colour and surface texture. Despite the complex process of glazing and firing, she maintains an incredible sense of spontaneity, balancing areas of light and dark, pattern and empty space and experimenting with different ways of mark making.