Elisa Helland-Hansen
Pleasure and Use
The Exhibition Rooms on the 2nd Floor
12.09.—13.10.2024
«Useful things move me, especially those that are handled daily. Cooking and shared meals also spark ideas in my studio practice. I aim for multiple qualities in one object: a color that excites, a shape that entices, a weight that stimulates, a surface that invites, a volume that is enough, a detail that you want to remember.»
In Elisa Helland-Hansen’s 50-year practice, the social, cultural, and aesthetic values of the meal have been closely tied to her approach to ceramics. In 2012, she moved from Bergen to rural surroundings outside Rosendal in the Hardangerfjord, where she established a workshop. Her encounter with the Western Norwegian nature and its abundant array of food resources became a life choice that nourished her artistic investigations. Throughout her career, she has consistently explored the principles of functionality and how making pottery best expresses itself in the relationship between food, drink, and vessel. The Hardangerfjord region encouraged a greater ecological awareness.
Gardening and foraging wild plants, jam-making, and fishing became elements that marked her well-known, archetypal object forms such as the cup, jug, and the oval, ovenproof dishes. Less familiar food traditions like fermentation inspired a new set of jars with both inner and outer lids, which ensured controlled fermentation without the introduction of air. Helland-Hansen is a skilled photographer, and when she uses this skill to document food and meal rituals, she manages to capture a contemporary phenomenon: the emphasis on handcrafted ceramics where sustainable and locally sourced food is served in bowls and on plates.
In the exhibition, a collection of 32 wanderbowls constitutes one of the main works. The inspiration for these bowls comes from a memory from Helland-Hansen’s youth, of well-used troughs and twisted wooden bowls seen at a folk museum. As an adult, the traces of visible wear from heavy use were something she wanted to experiment with in clay. In 2019, she drew on her extensive experience with wood-fired kilns to fire a series of hand built stoneware bowls in a salt kiln at 1 300 degrees Celsius. A friend carried one of them between two homes, giving rise to the name wanderbowls.
Those who have followed Helland-Hansen over several decades will recognise her ceramic tableware from her classic repertoire. However, the exhibition also features a series of new plates in various colour shades, Tessella. The technique involves repeating printed decorative elements where a mosaic of small squares is rotated and turned in a geometric surface pattern.
Tactile qualities within a solid and sophisticated formal language are the keynote of Helland-Hansen’s production. Viewed as a whole, it is the subtle changes – identified as shifts in mass and a refinement of the effects of the glaze – that often mark the progression of her work over time.
Elisa Helland-Hansen completed her education at the Bergen School of Arts and Crafts in the 1970s (now the Faculty of Fine Art, Music, and Design, University of Bergen). She regularly exhibits both in Norway and abroad. Her first solo exhibition was at the Nordenfjeldske National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in 1986. Two years later, she made her debut at Kunstnerforbundet with a solo exhibition. From 2000 to 2005, she was a professor of ceramics at the School of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg. Helland-Hansen is represented in major public collections in Norway.
Book launch: Pleasure and Use
As part of Oslo Culture Night on Friday, 13th of September, there will be a launch of the monograph Pleasure and Use (Nyte og nytte), along with a conversation between Elisa Helland-Hansen and co-editor Mary Barringer from the USA, will be held at Kunstnerforbundet at 18.00.
More on the book launch and event.
The exhibition is supported by Art Centres of Norway (Kunstsentrene i Norge), and the book has received funding from Arts and Culture Norway.