the Biennale - the community of association
/Danske Kunsthåndværkere & Designere - the Danish Association of Craft and Design is itself a community - not a trade guild in the medieval form but with many of the important functions of a traditional guild so supporting artists, encouraging communication and collaboration between artists and with a significant role in education and outreach.
Above all, through the Biennale and in the many exhibitions in the their gallery in Bredgade, the association gives artists an opportunity to show how their work is evolving and developing.
Much of the work shown in the Biennale is about that evolution and development and about continually experimenting and pushing the boundaries of materials and techniques in the crafts to achieve new forms and to express new ideas.
Three projects in the Biennale this year seem to exemplify the importance of developing and evolving skills ….
In their work På sporet af det danske ler - et råstof / In search of Danish clay - a raw material the ceramicist Bodil Manz and the architect Jacob Manz show how they have explored beaches and cliffs, not just to find and to use local raw materials but also to look for inspiration from salvaged materials to inspire forms, colours and textures for new works … both new 'Functional Tiles' and 'Table Objects'.
Materials and trials shown here include clay, brick rubble from Danish beaches and cliffs and samples of glaze and slip.
Bodil Manz
Bigware by Sisse Lee are monumental in size but thin and elegant in execution … using white stoneware, volcanic sand from Iceland, transparent glaze, black stoneware and porcelain to produce vessels that echo fundamental and almost universal forms for essential containers.
Through human history, any settled family and every larger community had to store water or food and had to master local materials to make vessels.
Torso, stoneware by the ceramicist Mariko Wada are presented as a group of three sculptures "expressing fragments of the shapes and structures of the human body" but are surely also about consummate skill in working with clay to produce ceramic art.
