THE DARK STORIES
Danish visual artist Mie Mørkeberg has ventured into ceramics as a new medium for her dystopic art and its flights of fancy.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many artists have challenged themselves, taken on new ways of expressing themselves. Danish artist Mie Mørkeberg is among them. Here, she explains how ceramics has become her new canvas.
– I’ve always been curious about different media and materials and have dabbled with many things. I also have some good colleagues who are potters, and suddenly the opportunity arose because a wonderful potter could help me. His name is Bjarne Puggaard, and he throws, glazes and fires the vessel for me. Doing it this way requires finding someone you trust and who is extremely skilled. You have to value each other’s artistic practices equally. And Bjarne – he’s just the best!
– As a painter, you always end up on the walls, so from an exhibition point of view, it’s great also having something on the floor – being able to express yourself spatially, and not just on surfaces. Besides, there’s something special about the vessel – the fact that you can walk around it and tell stories through it. Two entirely different things can happen on either side of the vessel, which makes a person want to walk around it and explore. I work a lot with mythological creatures, so the vessels also represent a nod to the Roman and Egyptian traditions of decorating vessels with stories and myths. – In which ways does ceramics change your artistic expression? – You can certainly see it’s my expression, but some other things happen nonetheless: The motif becomes simpler and the colours get harder to control because you have no idea how they will look after their firing. And once the vessels are fired, there’s no turning back. I really like the spontaneity of ceramics. It’s as if the clay takes control. It’s a much more unruly material to work with. When I paint a canvas, I have a tendency to stop too late. I constantly want to make changes. But with ceramics, I can’t keep on going in the same way. The clay is soft and wonderful to work with when the vessel arrives at my studio. As things like colour get added, though, the clay will start to dry and harden. So time is naturally limited, which increases the intensity and focus.
– Thematically, your works are based on dreams, science fiction, everyday life, political agendas and dystopia. How does ceramics support that?
– I’ve called my first major solo exhibition Kryptomania. The title references that which is coded, that which you cannot understand, that which is encrypted. When I work, I enter an unreal universe. I imagine myself entering a country where creations come into being from what surrounds me in my daily normal life. In the process, things from reality become encrypted, turned and twisted, emerging on the other side as my artistic expression. I become deeply engrossed in my work. Almost as if I’m in a trance. I reach down into some deeper layers, down into my subconscious. That’s where I work best artistically – whether its painting or ceramics. The large vessels I’m working on right now were all made in 2020. A year where everything was turned upside down. Where you didn’t know what was real. There are no boundaries. Everything is breaking up. I get a lot of inspiration from the darkness, from the states of mind where things may not be operating so smoothly. Since the wet clay has its limitations in terms of how long you can keep at it and how much you can revise, it very accurately captures my response to what is happening around me.