Artist interview: Eirik Falckner

Written by Simone Brunstad

Interview with Eirik Falckner before his upcoming exhibition Dulde Liv, opening on May 8 / 2025.

Falckner works across different mediums including sculpture, video, printmaking, textiles, and public installations. His work is deeply inspired by nature and the traces of the past. In our conversation, we talked about his background in graffiti, what the process of making art means to him, and how he finds a balance between freedom and structure in his process.

You’ve done quite a bit of graffiti. How did you get started, and what inspired the transition to ceramic art?
- I still do graffiti, so I wouldn’t really call it an immediate transition. I started with graffiti when I was around 17, and at the same time I also began drawing and painting. After that I’ve just gradually started working with more and more artistic mediums. I first started working with ceramics when I began at the art academy in Bergen.

So you didn’t have much experience with ceramics before art school?
- No, it requires some serious equipment, like a kiln and those kinds of things.

What’s the most rewarding part of working with ceramics?
- It’s very direct in a way. You shape the clay very directly, while at the same time you don’t have much control over the final result once it’s fired in the kiln.
So I think I like both of those aspects – that you shape the clay directly, but you still lose control during the process as it dries, gets fired, and glazed.

Do you usually work from sketches first, or do you shape the clay as you go?
- I mostly work very intuitively with the clay. I usually have a rough idea of what I’m making, but it often ends up quite different from the idea. The exhibition “Dulde Liv“ at SKOG right now is mostly masks, so in that case the process is naturally more concrete, since I know what I’m going to make.

Does the speedy process and freedom from graffiti still stick with you in your art?
- Yes, I also work very quickly and directly with clay.
I try to work efficiently, as sort of a release, where I don’t think too much, but just get straight to it.

Back to the graffiti scene – how would you compare that to the art school environment?
- That’s quite a big topic for me. I generally experience the graffiti scene as fairly conservative, it is a subcultural environment after all.
It’s both free and conservative, because there are a lot of strict rules in graffiti – hierarchies, for example, what you’re allowed to paint over, and the respect you’re supposed to show to those who came before you.
So I see it as anarchistic and free, but at the same time there are rules where most people follow a kind of strict aesthetic. Like following a recipe, in a way. I’ve probably drifted a bit out of the graffiti scene myself, since I don’t really follow all those graffiti rules anymore, and I would actually call what I do now wall painting – just outside.

But would you say it was a shift or a big difference between the two? From the graffiti scene to the art world, I mean.
- For me, one of the boring things about the graffiti scene is the aesthetic limitations. I’m no longer interested in painting graffiti the classical way, and that’s probably why I’ve distanced myself from that environment. Not to say that one is better than the other – but that’s what started to bore me a bit with graffiti. I constantly want to do something new.
The art school environment is also very free and open, in a way more so than the graffiti scene. You’re encouraged to experiment more with your art.
Still, it’s been four years since I finished my bachelors degree, and I actually feel like I work and think much more freely now than I did at the art academy. There are definitely some tight boxes and concepts you have to deal with.
There’s a general idea that you can do whatever you want in art school, but there are still some underlying rules about what’s considered “cool” and what’s “serious art” and what isn’t.
for instance, I also do tattooing, and most people would probably separate that from art – almost like a hobby on the side of the art I make. The same can apply to graffiti, where it’s seen as something more unserious that you do on weekends after a few beers, rather than something counted as an art form in itself. Some people even deliberately separate their artist name from their graffiti work. Art is about creating something and expressing something… It can really be through any kind of medium. Graffiti, tattooing, for example, are often looked down on, which is very strange to me, since I don’t really see the difference between that and what we call art. Ceramics and craft were also looked down on in the past, since it was considered “applied art” and a lower kind of art form. For me, it’s something that comes from outside myself, where I try to function as a kind of channel – and what comes out of that process is art.

Artist interview: Eirik Falckner

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