Marit Tingleff
Ornaments from Wetlands, Woods, Air and Water
The Window hall and the Cabinet
14.09.2023 – 15.10.2023

Marit Tingleff's latest series of wall-hung dishes, Faience series, and wall-leaning tiles, Standing tiles, are pres­ented in two exhibition rooms. In the green room the colour spectrum of copper and chrome is explored, and in the blue room the colour spectrum of cobalt. The objects refer to the reper­toire of ceramic prod­uc­tion of everyday things we surround ourselves with, such as tiles and table­ware. Dishes in faience were wide­spread in large parts of Europe in the 18th century. Faience was a cheaper alter­native to Chinese por­ce­lain for those who could not afford “the white gold”. The porous and more coarse-grained feel are qualities of faience that Tingleff takes up in her artistic expression.

“Walls filled with dishes and plates. Exclusive and rare in manors and palaces, simple and unpre­ten­tious in ordinary homes. Collectables, heirlooms, status and signs of wealth, memo­ra­bilia from exotic places.”

For many years Tingleff has been inspired by the histo­rical journey of por­ce­lain from Asia to Europe, and its cobalt blue colour as a metaphor and chemistry in cera­mic pro­cesses. The baroque design of the dishes is recog­nizable in her idiom of bends and curves. She scales up to monu­mental formats where the surfaces are charac­terized by flowing engobe (clay colours) and pictur­esque abst­ractions.

“Blue: air, sky, water, cold, like drinking from a stream, like taking a deep breath on a fresh morning. Cobalt oxide, exclusive, expensive, brutal to extract from the mines. The blue-white porcelain has been known for millennia in the dynasties of China. In our time, the words cobalt, copper, and chrome are politically charged and full of dilemmas”.

Behind the Faience series are labo­rious processes where repetition of methods and form has become a regular prin­ciple. Gravity has been allowed to deter­mine the direction of the flowing move­ments of the engobe down the surface, as dishes and tiles are lifted during the application. Vertical lines in repe­ti­tive rhythms shows signs that the action has been impul­sive, yet skilled. This organic play unfol­ding on the surface is refer­red to as orna­ment by Tingleff. In the broadest sense, orna­ment as a cyclical pheno­menon, rooted in the inter­action bet­ween nature and human unfolding of life.

“I stand in the workshop, the world enters through the ether. I produce, I use materials taken from the earth, I use energy to trans­form this wet, soft, dry grey into hard and robust, the heat deve­lops colours, which in turn are remini­scent of wetlands, soil, woods, air and water”.

On the windowsill, Tingleff has placed flower­pots closely together. The plant cuttings sprouting from peat-free soil spring out from a collec­tively funded planting project. She has throwed and deco­rated the pots with colour and glaze remains in the work­shop. The revenues from the sale go, in their entirety, to Sabima, an environ­mental organi­zation working to spread know­ledge about the conser­vation of species diversity.

Marit Tingleff is a Norwegian ceramist, with education from Bergen School of Crafts (1974–1977). She has estab­lished her own work­shop in Hønefoss. In 1987 and 1988 she had her inter­national break­through at the Scandi­navian Craft Today exhi­bition in Japan and the USA. She was profes­sor of ceramics at the University of the Arts in Oslo in the period 2013–2016. Her work is repre­sented in public and private collec­tions in Norway and abroad, such as the Design Museum Denmark, the National Museum of Norway and the Victoria & Albert Museum in England, to mention some. She has exhibited in several museums and galleries and was, among other things, one of three artists in the touring exhibition Forces in 2019 in KODE, Bergen, and in Sørlandets Kunst­museum, Kristian­sand, and Forces de la Nature in 2018 at the Musée de la Céramique de Sèvres, France.