A long row of Ceramic Art 2009

Tine Hecht-Pedersen has been trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at the Sculpture Department in the years 1984 – 1991 – in addition to a study at the Vrije Academie in the Hague, the Netherlands. As for most sculptors clay is also for her a basic working material, however early on she took the step further and experimented with the range of possibilities with glazing colours. Still at the academy she took part in a public art project at the Balsmose school in Ballerup in 1988. She participated  with a fiercely yellow glazed ceramic profile cornice and a brown dog at a corner, where the dog seems to put its head through the wall into a classroom. The year after she exhibited at Gentofte Art Library, and there made a tableau of which several parts were of ceramics.

The two central figures, symbolic representations of a woman and a man, made with a combination of various materials, however with ceramics to mark their heads. On a shelf stood also a stylised jug made in a faience paste after the same recipe as used by the Ancient Egyptians to manufacture their turquoise amulets, Egyptian paste.

The same material was used that year for two large, turquoise eyes in a oversized human female bust casted in concrete situated at Ishøj Technical College.

A thorough investigation of the possibilities of the glazed ceramics took place in the period from 2003 – 2004, and is still ongoing where she and her husband, the sculptor Pontus Kjerrman, have their own ceramics kiln in one of their studios. During the years an important sparring partner in the work with ceramics has been the neighbour, the ceramic artist Richard Kjærgaard.

Travels to China the latest years have both given insight and inspiration of a country with a long and strong ceramics tradition.

It all gathered speed in 2001, when Hecht-Pedersen exhibited a group of light, spiderweb´s like open shape constructions in sackcloth and plaster, covered  by papier mâché at the Culture Centre Toldkammeret in Elsinore.   In 2003 she showed similar open web construction experiments at the Interim exhibition, however this time conducted in glazed stoneware – among others the open blue vase shape that now belongs to the Vejen Art Museum. In 2005 – 2006 she worked with coils of clay put together side by side, as seen in the green glazed vase shape, a technique she also used over a paper core for the modelling of larger pieces. In the following years Hecht-Pedersen has continued to work with the net constructions, with which the sculpture instead of being created due to the volume of the material ends up being made of the hollow space that she made with small oblong pieces  of clay  put criss-crossed, the so called Tadpole technique, and continues to work into the ceramic web.

She worked intensively with this technique up to her solo exhibition at Vejen Art Museum in 2007 on the occasion of being awarded the Valdemar Petersen og wife Esther Moesmann Petersen grant, funded by the museum. The Sculpture Group belongs to this period of art work and shows how she connects the ceramic coils with sculptured face masks.   In some ways these web sculptures are related to the contemporary works of for example Bente Skjøttgaard. In different ways they use the lightness emerging from the work with the clay coils.

Teresa Nielsen

Director at Vejen Art Museum