BENTE SKJØTTGAARD

Elements in white

Bente Skjøttgaard is a ceramist: she was born in 1961. In much the same manner as a runner or an existential philosopher, she is cultivating her material, which is clay overcoated with an application of glaze. She is a master of her field and she is “inside” the clay in the sense that she is challenging herself each and every time she creates a new work. The glazed pieces are constantly becoming larger and more voluminous, with interiors consisting of complicated constructions, as is the case inside a person or an animal, a prehistoric creature or another biological phenomenon. And the beauty cannot be mistaken. It is a kind of primeval nature, but accordingly a nature that is created both from within and from without, in the course of a protracted reciprocal interplay. There is never a matter here of theoretical ceramics – everything is executed with a sensitivity and a sensibility for the materials’ capabilities and intrinsic value. Clay becomes form, lump, branch, tube, excrescence – it’s clear that certain rules of the game are useful but the very act transpiring between artist and material is of an almost sensual, erotic character. What we have before us is an instinctual drive, a symbiosis between artist and work […]

The ceramics are elemental and chaste, but Bente Skjøttgaard is not afraid of going to extremes. The artist moves wherever the clay happens to be pointing the way. Her ceramics look like stones and tree stubs that have fallen here and there on the mountainside, while we continue to move through the landscape; there are brooks that are babbling and snows that are melting. White glazes in all variations. There is proximity to moss and lichen, a feeling for snow, soft forms and erosion that upturns the mud and uncovers exquisite mineral deposits: kaolin, quartz and feldspar. Geological phenomena. Ceramics is geology – on the sophisticated and refined level. Basis and element converge with human beings’ ideas and present-day experience. Bente Skjøttgaard is working as a researcher; she writes down everything that she carries out in meticulous detail and she works with an admixture of glazes, but when she tests out the substance in the kiln and holds her creative productions up to the light of a final assessment, the systematics often break down. Here, it is only the aesthetic power and the expressive richness that count.

Erik Steffensen
Professor, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen