RYESTACK, the upcoming exhibition at SKOG art space! Welcome to vernissage Thursday 10. september at 18.00.
RYESTACK brings together new ceramic works by Sisse Lee and Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl, developed through a year-long dialogue between the artists. Decisions made in the studio, shifts in process, and mutual readings of each other’s work have helped to shape the direction of the exhibition.
Lee and Kaldahl are both contemporary Danish ceramic artists, but the similarities seemingly end there. They represent different generations, genders, backgrounds, but most importantly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) their works arise from very different artistic practices.
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl
Lee works with hand-built ceramics that draw their ideas from our shared material history. Bowls, vessels, columns, dishes and oats point towards use, ritual, and early material cultures, now detached from their purpose. The forms (drawn from Neolithic finds in this particular exhibition) are appropriative rather than signature-based: they take on historical, archaeological, and everyday references and connect them with a stripped-down contemporary consideration of ornament and function.
Sisse Lee
In Kaldahl’s work, form is fundamentally sculptural, materially driven, and precisely articulated. It may initially appear expressive, shaped by the impressions of the hand and the transformations of the ceramic process, but is in fact built through conceptual constraints and self-organising procedures rather than personal expression. The works in this exhibition are made through building, stacking and displacing, as individual elements are assembled into sculptural, sequential structures. Glaze unifies the surface as an integral part of the construction, while pressure marks, joints and irregularities remain visible.
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl
If Lee’s objects suggest how forms change meaning over time and in relation to their surroundings, Kaldahl’s works insist on the ability of form to self-articulate. Lee works through forms that are historically resonant and relational; Kaldahl through forms that are nearly autonomous. Both, however, work with a rigorous economy of means in which ornament, glaze or surface are inseparable from the construction of the form. The exhibition is therefore organised as a continuous sequence, to be read neither as two separate presentations nor as one unified style.
Sisse Lee
Sisse Lee (b. 1987, South Korea/Denmark) lives and works in Oslo. She holds an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2018), and BA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, Bornholm (2016).
Lee works with hand-built ceramic forms, vessels and objects. Her practice often draws on historical and archaeological artefacts as well as familiar utilitarian forms, which she reworks through shifts in scale, proportion, ornament and surface. Moving between the recognisable and the indeterminate, her work explores how ceramic forms can carry cultural, material and temporal meanings without being tied to a fixed function or narrative.
Lee has exhibited at Østfold Kunstsenter, Kunsthall Grenland, Kunstnerforbundet and RAM Galleri in Norway, Peach Corner, Biennale for Craft and Design and CHART Art Fair in Copenhagen, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Danish Arts Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Norwegian Arts Council.
Martin Bodilsen Kaldahl (b. 1954 Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen. He holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London (1990) and is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics.
Kaldahl works with sculptural, material-led ceramic forms. His works develop through repetition, accumulation and displacement, as individual elements are assembled into structures that both retain and extend a sense of movement. Working through a non-narrative approach, he allows form, rhythm and physical presence to remain open to multiple interpretations. His surfaces range from unglazed, elaborately textured clay to strong, monochrome glazes that lend the works a heightened sense of energy and spatial articulation.
Kaldahl has exhibited widely internationally, and his work is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Nasjonalmuseet, Röhsska Museum, Designmuseum Danmark, Trapholt, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark and Sèvres – Musée national de Céramique. A comprehensive monograph covering his work from 1990 to 2024 was published by Hatje Cantz in 2024 – in connection with a major retrospective show at CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art.