Join the public presentation and assessment of an ongoing artistic research project!

Thursday 1 December, Sigrid Espelien, PhD fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Art and Craft Department, will be presenting her mid-term evaluation of her artistic research project "Grounding with (blue) clay". The following introduction will be the starting point for the seminar:

In the artistic research project “Grounding with (blue)clay”, I experiment with ways of working with clay in the landscape and with the landscape in clay. I see clay not only as a material resource for ceramic art, but also clay as soil, landscape, and land. With different artistic methods, I "read" clay through the body, through the place where the clay is found, and through technology. By technology, I mean both the processing of clay and other clay-to-ceramic technology, but also digital technology such as 3D scanning and 3D printing with clay. Through field trips, collaborations, and workshops with different groups of people, I visit and spend time in different landscapes where clay is found. The meeting between body(s), clay, and landscape in all its complexity opens the door to questions about extractive processes, geology, local history, and future speculations. When the season is colder, I move into the workshop with found clay, 3D scans, notes, photographs, and other material and continue to work with the complexity in a more studio ceramist kind of way. My background is precisely from ceramic art, and I want to both be inspired by and challenge the already existing ways of transferring and acquiring knowledge in the field, such as bodily and verbal transfer of knowledge. In my education I learned how to control the material so that I could reproduce the same ceramic object time and time again. What happens if the clay landscape becomes part of the context and influences the artistic process? What can clay in the landscape teach us?

Moderator and main supervisor: Liv Bugge
Opponent: Anne Helen Mydland

Earlier this year, ROM and Espelien also collaborated on ROM studio. That project focused on the ongoing collaboration with Arely Amaut and Stacy Jo Scott. Sigrid is based in Oslo, Stacy Jo is in Eugene, Oregon, USA and Arely is in Cusco, Peru. READ MORE.

Sigrid Espelien has in recent years, delved into blueclay as a material and as an entrance to place and storytelling. It was first in 2013 when Sigrid moved to Oslo after ten years of ceramic art education and practice that she saw the blueclay that lay in all construction sites in the rapidly growing city. Through working with this clay, mainly from Oslo, but also elsewhere in Norway and clays from other countries, it opened many questions about clay as more than a material for art production, but also as landscape, soil and land. Sigrid has a ceramics education from the Glass and Ceramics School on Bornholm in Denmark and an MA in ceramics and fine arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, USA.

Anne Helen Mydland (1971, Norway) Professor in Clay and Ceramics and and artistic research leader at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. Mydland holds a MA degree from Bergen Academy of Arts and Design (2000), and has since worked as both visual artist, curator, educator and researcher. She has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally and has been purchased by the leading institutions such as the National Museum and KODE.
Mydland has been working with developing artistic research as a research discipline nationally and internationally for many years and have been vice dean of research at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (2017-2021), board-leader for the Norwegian Artistic Research School, and been leading several artistic research projects, among them Topographies of the Obsolete.