Pottery decorated with images from nature has been common since early times. In Biosenario the decoration grows from the surface of the porcelain bowl, and unlike much of the floral décor we know, the focal point here is the wild, untamed nature. From uncultivated nature we get superstitions, myths and scare stories. Nature is beautiful and refreshing but also grim and threatening. The bowls disappear behind the growth, taken over by wilderness.
The project is a collaboration between two Norwegian artists, Tone Einelia and Kjersti Sletteland. Each pot is decorated by both of them, frantically and constantly over many hours. The process is a battle or dance between two individuals, creating chaos and friction but also balance.
Text by Giles Sutherland
BIOSENARIO [also] use the bowl as the starting point of their work. These too may be termed a kind of ‘narrative exploration’ but as well as folklore, they delve into contemporary stories and events, as well as dreams, incorporating all manner of complex, funny, frightening, provocative imagery in the process.
Working together at the same time and in the same place, Einelia and Sletteland enter into a kind of dramatic dialogue, where one artist’s shaping of the clay into various weird and wonderful forms will engender a reciprocal response. It’s a kind of dance of the imagination, where heads and faces, vermicular forms and biomorphic masses squirm and writhe, like the entanglement of dreams. These are narratives, diaries, visual journals of the psyche, caught and frozen, fired and captured in clay.
EXHIBITIONS
2020 Northbound, Fjell Festning, Fjell, Norway
2018 Northbound, Shetland Arts, Shetland, Scotland
2018 Sofa, Kraft, Bergen, Norway
2018 Northbound, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Caithness, Scotland
2018 Northbound, An Talla Solais, Ullapool, Scotland
2017 The Royal Scottish Academy RSA Open Exhibition 2017
2017 Paisley Art Institute 129th Annual Exhibition, Paisley
2016 Winter Exhibition, Tatha Gallery, Newport-on- Tay
2016 Scottish Art Club, Edinburgh
2016 The Royal Scottish Academy RSA Open Exhibition 2016
2016 RSA Open, Royal Scottish Academy 2016
2015 Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
2015 Videonale & Kunstselskap (video art festival), Alvøen, Norway
2015 Basement gallery, Voss Norway
2014 Celebrating Ceramics St. Margarets House, Edinburgh
2014 Galleri Mjøsvågen, Osterøy Norway
2013 Winter Art Fair, Bergen Norway
2014 Dei på Gjerdet, Fjell Norway
2012 Alvøen Ceramics Studio, Norway
AWARDS
2017 Paisley Art Institute's 2M Award
2016 RSA Open's An Talla Solais Residency Prize
EVENTS
Artist talk, An Talla Solais 6/7/2018
Artist talk for children, An Talla Solais 6/7/2018
Gone to Pot, Spontaneous ceramic workshop, An Talla Solais 7/7/2018
PRESS
Art North, The Contemporary Visual Art Magazine, Northbound / Nordgående review - text by Ian McKay
Link here
Northbound / Nordgående review - text by Giles Sutherland
Link here