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What can clay do now?

Over the course of its 55-year history, Tendencies has showcased Nordic craft and celebrated material-based practice. The 47th iteration focuses on ceramic art: a timely intervention in the vibrant cultural moment ceramics is enjoying, as contemporary artists and makers find extraordinary and exciting new potential in an ancient medium. Yet this renewed fascination with clay also carries its own tensions, between tradition and innovation, art and craft, and the possibilities (and politics) of making against an increasingly urgent backdrop of environmental concern.

This year’s curator, Maria C. Havstam, has brought together ten ceramic artists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden whose diverse practices explore the possibilities of clay through a striking range of forms, techniques and approaches. Rather than attempting to define what contemporary Nordic ceramics might be, the exhibition seems more interested in opening up the question: what can clay do now?

Inspired by American ceramicist George Ohr, the self-proclaimed ‘mad potter of Biloxi’, Havstam is guided by the concepts of head, heart, hand and soul. These interconnected themes create space to consider the merging of idea, emotion and skill in the process of shaping ceramics - and perhaps, too, the peculiar agency of the material itself. Clay is remarkably responsive, but never entirely obedient: it records pressure, movement and touch, while firing introduces an element of unpredictability that places the maker in dialogue with forces beyond their control. The resulting works therefore embody not only what the artists intend to make, but also what this mutable material allows them to discover along the way.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that many of the pieces on display as part of 47th Tendencies explore the deeply physical, human quality that characterises our close connection with clay. Anthropomorphic figures abound, even - in the case of Andreas Scholze’s work - escaping the gallery. The unusual sight of a classic Pontiac automobile (the artist’s own) abandoned by the road leading out of Galleri F15 becomes stranger on close inspection, revealing one of Scholze’s humanoid sculptures hunched in the driving seat - an existential crisis in clay. The haunting scene underscores the dystopian undercurrent of Scholze’s ceramic practice, in which humour mixes with melancholy to question our humanity and relationship with the natural environment. The ghostly ceramic skin of a tiger on the lawn and a small (but no less sinister) figure on the stairs inside carry Scholze’s uncanny, unsettling vision into the gallery.

The disconcerting nature of Scholze’s work is heightened by their rough surfaces, which she achieves by raw glazing. The gaping eyes and void-like holes that puncture her figures also have a functional aspect, allowing Scholze to work the large handbuilt forms, while also allowing viewers to examine the inner surface. Her not-quite-human figures speak to the terror of our times, while also riffing on traditions and folklore; Scholze cites trolls, Tove Jansen’s Groke and the humanoid, shape-shifting Nøkken of Scandinavian mythology as distant relatives of her creations. Here in Norway, the spectre of Munch’s anxious, dread-ridden figures also lurks in the imagination.

The hulking, raw forms that make up Anders Hald’s We Can Be Heroes series occupy part of the gallery’s upper floor. Roughly hewn from large blocks of clay massed around an iron core, these pieces are truly imposing, almost intimidatingly so. Yet there’s a tenderness and vulnerability at play and a softness to the surface that invites the touch. Riffing on David Bowie’s anthem of hope in the face of chaos, Hald crafts ceramics with soul.

On a smaller - but still bodily - scale, Christina Schou Chistensen’s unruly, squishy pots sag, slump and leak, more like bulbous body parts than vessels. The gloopy pink glaze is immediately striking. In Christensen’s hands, it’s transformed into something far stranger than surface polish. Here, glaze takes on a life of its own, flowing and pooling, before solidifying into structural, sculptural forms. Motion frozen in time, with much left to chance in the kiln

While the playful, pastel glaze is visually appealing and infinitely instagrammable, Christensen’s experimental practice confronts serious issues of sustainability and waste. Responding to the environmental issues inherent within the craft of ceramics, Christensen works with waste industrial materials (including sanitary ceramics) and a crushing machine to explore new ways of making sustainable art.

Across the gallery, pink dazzles in the polished, bejewelled pots of Swedish ceramic artist Fanny Ollas. Ollas’ anthropomorphic vessels draw on traditional ceramic form, but are infused with styles and forms from her background in fashion and design. Her pots dare to be decorative, even kitsch, replete with ribbons, ruffles, diamantes and pearls. With curved, feminine bodily forms, each piece holds a sense of power and vulnerability that taps into the complicated relationship between femininity, adornment and self-presentation.

As with other work included in Tendencies, Ollas’s ceramics are playful but tinged with melancholy. Her work explores how ceramics can function as both everyday objects and symbols shaped by one’s inner landscape, transforming the familiar vessel into something more psychologically charged. In Ollas’s practice, the pot becomes less a container than a character: glamorous, slightly absurd, and unmistakably alive.

Colour as a carrier of meaning emerges in Iraqi-Norwegian artist Wisam Al-Samad’s presentation of works from his Aurora of Love and The Road of Love series. Using a palette inspired by both Eastern aesthetics and the colours of the Northern Lights, Al-Samad draws on clay to consider how shared cultural experiences and emotions can overcome national and linguistic barriers. His calligraphy forms inject a note of joy into the muted gallery space that houses them.

Using a very different approach, Swedish-Chilean Anton Alvarez embraces technological innovation and experimentation in the creation of his large, architectural clay sculptures. The colourful spray-painted surface intensifies each work’s shifting materiality, which somehow seem hard and soft, weighty and light, classical and urban.

On a much smaller scale, Astrid Sleire crafts a landscape of thin slabs concertinaed in ever-unfolding forms. A rusted, industrial effect emerges from Sleire’s labour-intensive technique, that involves repeated firings and the application of an underglaze at the work’s final stage. It’s hard to resist the temptation to touch the works and feel the surprising flexibility that Sleire brings to her ceramics. As with the work of Al-Samad, Sleire’s practice plays with clay’s proximity to language and expression, leaving space for the viewer to enter into the conversation.

A quieter dialogue takes place in Nina Andrea Standerholen organic, tactile vessels, which draw on her deep connection to the Norwegian landscape - Standerhold combines her ceramic practice with work as a shepherdess in Norway’s Rondane National Park, and often carries out field research with a camera and microscope. Each piece has a meticulously-worked textured skin that evokes the surface of a leaf or the ground beneath our feet. Here, clay offers a new way of seeing and responding to the minute wonders of the natural world.

Ane Fabricuis Christiansen’s ceramics similarly express a deep connection to the landscape, but her work emerges as if from the depths of the earth’s core - molten, metallic, prehistoric. Their geological form comes from Christiansen’s experimental technique of applying metal onto the clay in the kiln, part of her ongoing interest in material science and chemistry. In Christiansen’s hands, ceramics approach alchemy.

In one room on the ground floor, Havstam breaks from the modernist, muted curation of 47th Tendencies to celebrate the exhibition’s founder and pioneering Norwegian ceramicist Erik Pløen (1925-2004). Entering a vibrant blue space, visitors are greeted by a wall of Pløen’s stunning pots, which showcases the development of his style from the 1950s to the 2000s. This is a celebration not just of an individual, but rather of the collaborative, ever-evolving nature of ceramics itself, not just a single practitioner: Pløen’s work developed in dialogue with artists based in the USA and he built Norway’s first ceramic gas kiln after a period of teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. As this year’s exhibition highlights, Tendencies is a showcase of Nordic art that positions it in relation to - and in conversation with - global cultural forms and movements.

Across 47th Tendencies, clay emerges as both ancient material and contemporary language, capable of holding histories while imagining new futures. It is a fitting reminder that the most compelling objects are often those that refuse to settle neatly into the categories of art or craft, function or fantasy. The exhibiting artists demonstrate that a clay vessel is a meeting point between hand, material, imagination and the unpredictable forces of the world around us.

47th Tendencies: Kneaded. Shaped. Fired. runs until 11 October 2026.
All images courtesy the artists and Galleri F15.

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In the 1950s, a casserole dish firing in a kiln signalled the culmination of one maker’s lifelong pursuit of form, function, and financial independence. These dishes – praised for their utility – also showed unique aesthetic flourish: they included a twisted handle curved with a wink. Emerging from a workshop, hidden away in a creative commune, this maker took the means of production into her own hands and craft took her on a journey, from navigating life as a single-mother in experimental creative communes, to finding queer love in pursuit of the perfect kiln…

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So, how did this humble bucket help one maker protest? Read on to find out…

Welcome to our new series – Objects of Dissent – eight essays that will develop over the course of the year. In each one, we pick an object that holds a connection to decorative dissidence. We examine surface tensions and the stories objects reveal when we dive deeper into stories of makers who’ve crafted resistance in the last 150 years…

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How about you?

We’d love to hear about the crafts you’ve started – or are going to start – this new year! Leave your reading recommendations, top tips and favourite projects in the comments below… and if you have an exhibition, book, guide, workshop or anything else you’d like us to feature in our monthly round-ups for 2026, please get in touch!

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