KARI AASEN

Feelings for Coiling

7 March - 28 April 2024

Kari Aasen is a ceramicist who primarily works with stoneware clay and porcelain, focusing mainly on sculptural objects and installations.

The interaction between the material and the hand is emphasized in her ceramic works. The focus lies on process and time through repetitive actions. She works layer by layer, analytically and intuitively. She synchronizes ideas and consciousness with emotions and intuitions in the crafting of her objects. Tactility, intensity, movement, and harmony are sensations and contrasts in her exploration between the beautiful and the aesthetically interesting.

Structures and constructions act as supportive skeletons. What is on the surface, what lies beneath, and what becomes visible through the layers? Primary forms and bases are constructed and assembled. Coiling is a simple ancient technique used to shape objects. Soft and pliable clay is rolled with the fingers, assembled, and objects are built. Meditative thoughts and reflections arise through the slow buildup of the process.

Aasen highlights craftsmanship, the intimate character, and the tactile structures on the surface. Traces of the direct ceramic process remain. Abstracted fragments of organic forms in nature, cracked and raw.

Aasen works with series as a starting point. Shades of expression vary throughout the process, and the organic visual language adds new facets within the overall structure of the series. Common, yet different. Glazes are fired layer by layer multiple times to achieve the desired expression.

Aasen is always in search of new possibilities in material variations and nuances. Tradition and renewal.

"The artist Kari Aasen works with manifestations. We are often led to believe that it is only about tangible ceramic manifestations, linked to traditional qualities such as material, craftsmanship, and form. However, it turns out that this is only part of the truth. Despite her extensive production of both small and large objects, concrete utilitarian forms and more abstract sculptural expressions, numerous material experiments, and object-rich installations, I would argue that Aasen's manifestations primarily concern something very intangible, namely ideas, time, life, and death. Her artistry appears to me as deeply existentialist; it is simply about being human; about examining the individual components of the surroundings and the transience of nature, and through this, manifesting her own wondering presence in the world."

(From art historian Mai Lahn-Johannessen's text: Traces)

Kari Aasen, (b. Bergen 1950), has her academic background from Bergen Academy of Art and Design 1974, Master's degree in specialized art from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts 2001.

Aasen has a long list of exhibitions at home and abroad: KRAFT Bergen, Format Oslo, Nordenfjeldske Trondheim, KODE Bergen, Hå Old Vicarage, Kunstbanken Hamar, Amy Lee Gallery Beijing, Kunsthall Lokstallet and Västerås Art Museum Sweden, MK Ciurlionis Lithuania, The National Museum of Foreign Art, Latvia, Elverket Finland, Nordic Herritage Museum Seattle USA, GICB in South Korea.

Acquisitions (selected): KODE, Bergen municipality, Nordenfjeldske, Västerås Art Museum, GICB South Korea. Comission art projects: Several major public space comissions, Bergen municipality, Bodø municipality, nursing homes and schools. Grants: Travel and work grants, GI, NK's Honorary Prize 2021.