Stoneware Unfired #Möbius (2000)

These works sit at the threshold between the organic and the abstract, between touch and thought.

The centerpiece is a series of stoneware forms that hold the shape of something deeply familiar: the pea, the seed, the kernel. Unfired, the clay retains its raw earth tone;  a warm, deep brown that recalls soil and root, the underside of things. Two forms emerge from the series: one a closed, kidney-shaped mass, turned in on itself like a thought not yet spoken; the other a torus, a ring with a hollow eye at its center, open to the air it surrounds. They appear to float against a neutral ground, lit from above as though under quiet examination.

The title’s reference to Möbius is not incidental. The Möbius strip is a surface with only one side; a loop that returns to itself having passed through its own inside. These forms carry that same paradox in clay: they are both complete and restless, bounded and continuous. The ring-form especially seems to bend back on itself, its surface flowing without interruption from outside to in. (Read more about Möbius in my research article "Fraværet som gir nærvær" in "Jan Erik Vold & Jan Erik Vold" (2000) Cappelen forlag.)

I wrote a catalogue page with notes records the same forms in documentation: dimensions noted, length 55 cm / 25 cm / 29 cm "steingods, råbrent med krom og kopper oksyd." The forms exist here in measurement as well as in space, taken down in a hand that holds them carefully. The large granular sculpture;  covered in dense, rounded nodules like a skin of seeds, belongs to the same body of thought: growth as accumulation, form as repetition, the biological translated into something monumental and still.