Pauliina Pöllänen at Hordaland Kunstsenter

The exhibition Porous Worlds presents a cross-section of Pauliina Pöllänen ́s approach to exploring ceramic relief, during a PhD in artistic research at the Faculty of Art, Music & Design, University of Bergen. Her PhD project is an in-depth meditation on the relief form, examining its intermediate modes between craft and art, sculpture and image, as well as architectural ornament and object.

The provenance of relief dates back thousands of years and spans across human civilizations. It is traditionally seen as belonging to the field of sculpture, modelled or carved, yet containing a background which provides a pictorial space, reaching towards an image. Compared to freestanding sculpture, the relief has an inherent material economy that affords it the agency to depict historical events with crowds, skies with stars, and has the potential of perspective. Pöllänen ́s PhD project responds to the notion of relief ́s gradual decrease from contemporary art after the world wars. Reliefs are undeniably made by contemporary artists today, but there is a lack of research, exhibitions, or writings about relief, which explains why its position is marginal and status vague.

In the reliefs exhibited in Porous Worlds, the image’s possibility of narrative space intersects with the flattened volume of sculptural expression, oscillating between the flatness of low relief and the sculptural qualities of high relief. The reliefs are exhibited on specially made wooden structures – leaning or hanging, sometimes allowing the viewer to look through them – highlighting how the presentation of a work affects how it is perceived.

Pöllänen ́s sculptural practice is rooted in the language of clay, and is driven by a curiosity of what kind of exchanges can arise through interaction with the plasticity of the material. Her reliefs are in many ways imbued with serendipity, when she attentively shapes the work and investigates the possibilities that arise in the process. While she is interested in the junction of the everyday and the metaphorical, many of the reliefs derive from the presence of memories which are perceived as images – like porous worlds which glide through each other, touching and forming a new constellation.

Pauliina Pöllänen (b. 1983, Finland) graduated 2012 from the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. In recent years she has exhibited at the CLAY Museum in Danmark, Gustavsberg Porcelain Museum in Sweden, Trøndelag senter for samtidskunst, Uppsala Art Museum in Sweden, Design Museum in Finland, and the Victoria & Albert Museum among other places. She lives and works in Bergen.