Pauliina Pöllänen
Hard Bounds
The Skylight Hall
11.09.—12.10.2025

The exhibition Hard Bounds by Pauliina Pöllanen presents a surreal sculptural instal­lation of ceramic reliefs extending through layers of physical and psycho­logical space, turning the inside out.

Hard Bounds draws on the traditional format of a landscape as well as abstraction and cartoon, but also from the asso­ciative emergence of form during the process of hand building with clay. The anthropo­morphic qualities of the land­scape connect with art history and Finnic folk­lore, mixed with figurative and geometric shapes, forming together a spirited scene.

The reliefs are removed from the wall for a free-standing constel­lation in the center of the room, exploring the relation­ship of image space and sculptural objects mani­fested in the form of a portal.

In her artistic research project Porous Worlds – the Liminal Spaces of Relief, Pöllänen investi­gated the relief and its intersections with art, craft, archi­tecture, and orna­ment, con­si­dering its multiple aspects as an artistic medium. Her sculptural practice, rooted in clay, extends this inquiry by exploring the material and con­ceptual exchanges that emerge through enga­ge­ment with this malleable sub­stance. Within this frame­work, she examines the inter­play between the everyday and the meta­phorical. Many of her reliefs draw upon asso­ciations, app­re­hended as images—evo­cative, porous worlds that overlap and inter­pe­netrate, gene­rating new constel­lations of meaning. The exhi­bition in Kunstner­forbundet is a continu­ation of this.

Pauliina Pöllänen (b. 1983, Finland) lives and works in Bergen. She graduated from the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo in 2012, and in 2023 she completed her doctoral studies at The Art Academy of KMD, University of Bergen, where she now works as Associate Professor. In recent years she has had solo exhibitions at Hordaland kunst­senter (2023) and Format (2024), and has partici­pated in group exhi­bitions at the National Museum, Oslo (2023), and CLAY Keramik­museum in Den­mark (2022) and Gustavs­bergs Porslins­museum in Sweden (2022). Works can be found in the collections of the National Museum, Norden­fjeldske National Museum of Deco­rative Arts and Design, KODE, and Uppsala Konst­museum, among other public and private collections.

The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council Norway and The Art Academy – Depart­ment of Con­tem­porary Art, KMD, University of Bergen.

Text by Henriette Noermark

“The body is our primary medium for engaging with the world,” wrote the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We perceive, navigate, and understand through the body—never passive, always intentional, moving through space as both witness and participant. This understanding shapes how we encounter Pauliina Pöllänen’s Hard Bounds in Kunstnerforbundet’s skylit hall, where clay, form, and architecture converge into a single, living landscape.

At the center, three monumental ceramic panels rise, side by side. In a mist-wrapped scenario, a pair of bare trees stand anchored on a checkered ground as if waiting to reach the sky – next to them, a precious, luminous tree bursts forth, its vast roots twisting and reaching as if hunting for new ground beyond the frame. The works speak in tension: a dialogue of stillness and surge, of fragility and ferocity, of absence and presence demanding to be seen.

The open passages, the important non-spaces, reveal the deep-blue rear wall, turning void into atmosphere, backdrop into image, and inviting movement through the space. Poised atop an iron frame, the installation leaves room to notice how the quiet horizon beckons you closer, a threshold where the distinction between image and sculpture dissolves. For Pöllänen, the relief is a living, ambiguous form, oscillating between surface and depth, ornament and structure. Rooted in clay, her practice explores the material’s plastic potential, steeped in tradition, yet fully contemporary.

Take your seat. Set your thoughts free to wander. Surrender softly. In front, two curvy ceramic benches extend the installation. They rest there like silent witnesses, their surface marked with watchful eyes, as if bearing an unseen weight. Quiet and enduring, they seem to have always belonged here, steadfast in form and presence. Their palette of matte shades of beige and whites, subtle greens, and turquoise, along with understated ornamental details, echoes the panels and offers gestures of pause, reflection, and quiet hospitality. Benches and reliefs together form a scene that is at once landscape, stage, and architecture—an environment where body, object, and space are inseparable.

Hard Bounds is at once meditation and encounter. It bears the intensity of its making—laborious, physical, wild—and transforms it into a sensorial field. A constructed landscape emerges, charged with silence and depth, inviting the viewer not merely to look, but to dwell, to feel the weight of clay, the rhythm of space, and the quiet pulse of presence.