Ane-Katrine von Bülow
Cosmic Flower. Awarded a prize at the 2006 Koblenz International Salt Glaze Exhibition. 22 x 44 cm.
CeramicsTECHNICAL No. 34 2012
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The Perfect Mistakes
Katrine Villadsen explains how von Bülow benefits from mistakes
T
he danish ceramist ane-katrine von bülow
works with precise patterns on porcelain pieces of a high technical and artistic quality. Here she talks about seeing the possibilities in mistakes and daring to let go of control by experimenting with firing with soda and wood instead of gas. “My things are normally made under conditions of extreme control. But then you get something from the firing – the fire, the ashes and the soda – that is uncontrollable. The expression of the fire is allowed to interfere and that is of course what I am looking for.” The Danish ceramics artist von Bülow is behind the wheel of her Saab talking herself warm on the subject I have come with her to touch on today: Her art and the relationship between technical perfection and the gift of coincidence. We are on our way to her shop/studio as she continues: “I often get a little disappointed when I open a woodfired soda kiln and I think: ‘What have you done?’ But after a while I often start to care about the things after all. Even though I usually work towards an expression of perfection and straight lines I still appreciate that they become absolutely unique from soda firing. For instance, I have a vase that went kind of wrong. And maybe I just should not sell it, right? Because it turned out so well and I can never make one like it again. So I don’t exactly put in the front row,” she smiles. We turn into a quiet side street in posh Hellerup just north of Copenhagen. As I step into the shop I am greeted by a fine setup of bowls, vases and other things showing that precise geometric idiom for which von Bülow is famous. And true enough – there in the back on a plinth is a vase with a pattern which clearly has had its edges pulled in the firing which makes it stand out from the rest and their more strict expression. Von Bülow’s special style comes from printing serigraphic patterns on clean porcelain shapes such as bowls or dishes. In that way her elegant works are both complexly embellished and simply shaped. Normally she fires the precisely decorated pieces in a gas kiln after bisque firing them in an electric kiln. But some years ago she started experimenting with wood and soda firing too. First Soda Firing Led To A Second Prize “The first time I fired with soda was at Guldagergaard (an international ceramics research centre in Denmark). I had brought some bowls with large patterns for firing there. They were completely round, in the bottom too where I had sanded a tiny foot for them to stand on. After the firing they had shifted their shape so much because of their weight and the small standing surface but, in return, the soda glaze turned out well. I had blown soda in to the kiln so that it had been nicely distributed fairly evenly on the bowls and it had given them a great beauty. And I too could see that, once I had gotten used to how crooked they had turned out. They had become almost textural and so beautiful. So I sent them to a competition in Germany (Koblenz International Salt Glaze Competition). I was up against all sorts of people who had fired with soda all their lives and I just sent those two crooked bowls off. I did have some rubber rings made for them to stand straight on but when I arrived there they had been removed and the bowls stood there all crooked just like when they were taken out of the kiln. And you know what – I was awarded a second prize. (Salzbrandkeramik 2006) And it was the first time I had ever fired soda,” she laughs. “To top that, one of the members of the jury came up to me and whispered that he thought I should have had the first prize – and then he bought one of the bowls.” 4
CeramicsTECHNICAL No. 34 2012
She continues: “Soda firing gives exactly the touch of fire and warmth and tactility that you can not bring to the piece by yourself in any other way. You have to give in to the forces of nature which you get through the kiln. It is out of your hands, out of your control,” muses the perfectionist. “The process itself is also quite wonderful, with the wood, fire and teamwork. It takes at least two people to fire the kiln.” Earlier that day when I visited her at her lovely house in the free town of Christiania in Copenhagen she showed me a large bowl with a perfect black and white pattern – and a huge blue dollop in the middle: “I am usually not the kind of person who keeps a lot of my own stuff around, I sell them you know. But this one, which I fired at Guldagergaard, has become sort of a souvenir for me and it is one of the things I have not sold,” she says. “At that time I thought that there needed to be lots of air above the bowls to make sure the soda got on the inside of the bowls too. But quite to the contrary the draught and flow round the things directs the soda right into the middle of the bowls. So as we experimented with blowing the soda through all of the holes of the kiln, most of it went straight to the bottom inside them. And I am sure that one of our blows became that giant blue blob in the bottom of that bowl.” She later started having the kiln shelves closer to the top of the bowls and thereby reduced the amounts of soda getting into them. That way she has gained more control with the glazing process. “I am not interested in my patterns sliding too much. So I have started bringing only things with large patterns to fire at Guldagergaard, it works better with those when they slide a bit,” she says while looking at one of the other bowls she has kept in her home: “It is funny that some of the things I have fired at Guldagergaard – they are the ones I keep,” she laughs and pours some thick matcha tea for me while telling me about another project that went ‘wrong’. The World On A Dish Von Bülow and 10 other women artists were preparing for an exhibition called The World On A Dish which was going to be shown in Denmark in January 2011. Part of the project was to work together at Guldagergaard in order to make and fire the things for the exhibition. The concept was to create individual objects with a communal theme that had the Greek caryatids as a starting point. Caryatids are pillars shaped as women holding up the roof. The small caryatids of von Bülow’s group were to carry dishes instead of roofs. The shaping of her dishes had already been prepared at home before going: “I brought two dishes. One was dyed with black porcelain mass and the other had a pattern printed on it which is what I most often do – it was a complementary pattern of another dish I had already. At Guldagergaard I was going to fire a soda kiln with Paul Scott (the famous print maker of Cumbria, England) and I had gone out of my way to be properly prepared: The porcelain firing bases, which fitted the dishes perfectly for support, had been covered in felt soaked in aluminium oxide which would keep my dishes and their bases from melting together during the firing. So I had thought it through,” she says. “But to stack a wood kiln is a big job. It takes a bunch of wadding balls under each and every thing going into the kiln. My things are big, round and need to be placed in the middle of the kiln so it was a slow process and it got late. After a while Scott became impatient which stressed me. So in the end I only put wadding around the edges CeramicsTECHNICAL No. 34 2012
Facing page, top: Fragment. 2009. Sodafired porcelain. 12 x 24 cm. Photo by Katrine Villadsen. Facing page, center: Meteor. 2008. Silk printed gas fired porcelain. 6 x 46 cm. Photo by Ole Akhøj. Facing page, below: Fragment. 2011. Soda fired triangle form in porcelain. 24 x 20 cm. Photo by Katrine Villadsen. Top: A sodafired bowl with enlarged print based on a photo of limegrass. 24 x 48 cm. Photo by Katrine Villadsen. Centre: Limegrass. 2010. Soda fired porcelain. 12 x 24 cm. Above: Meteor. 2011. Twice soda fired silk printed porcelain. Photo by Ole Akhøj.
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Ane-Katrine von Bülow in her studio shop in 2010 working with the slipcast porcelain dish and the stoneware caryatids.
“My things are normally made under conditions of extreme control. But then you get something from the firing – the fire, the ashes and the soda – that is uncontrollable. The expression of the fire is allowed to interfere and that is of course what I am looking for.”
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(between the dishes and their support bases) and I forgot to put it in the middle too. At the top temperature of the kiln at 1280ºC the porcelain clay becomes soft and there is a risk for it to shift and become deformed. And as the support bases sank down where I had forgotten the wadding the dishes sank too and they got deformed. So when they emerged after cooling down they both looked like hammocks,” she remembers with a little smile. “That was quite a fix to be in with an exhibition just around the corner. Thank God I was at Guldagergaard and some of the other resident artists wanted to fire the soda kiln. As I was experienced with that particular kiln I booked a spot in that firing even though it was snowy and freezing.” The plan was to try to rescue the two dishes by re-firing them. “Before the new firing started I had managed to fire two new support bases in an electric kiln. I had fired them up to the same temperature of 1280ºC as the deformed dishes so that they were the exact right size. For the new soda firing we fired all the way up to 1300ºC to make the things even softer. And my dishes straightened out during that firing. That was sort of magic, right? Everybody who knew about my refiring project thought I was crazy and that it would never work. But in fact I got two beautiful dishes from it and they had become even more beautiful from the extra firing,” she smiles confidently. That way a firing gone wrong was turned into an even better result and those two dishes were among the few that made it to the exhibition The World On A Dish. Later they were even selected for the Crafts and Design Biennale 2011 at Koldinghus, Denmark. “It is something I like to do; I fire my things until I think there are a success. I am not in a hurry. After I fire them in the gas kiln I actually quite often refire them in an electric kiln after applying more glaze or touching them up with more colour. It may not be the normal thing to do but then again my things are not exactly cheap. I make artwork so I think I am allowed to be particular. If I am to hand on something it must be good. It must hurt a little bit when I let it go,” she ascertains. From Porcelain to Concrete As a declared perfectionist, von Bülow always aims for ‘the perfect dish’ and it is something she has worked towards since 2006 when she had to make a dish for the exhibition Table Manners at the Craft Council Gallery, London. The dish turned out really well though its weight wrecked an expensive kiln shelf in the process. Perfection has a price. After the first dish she continued working on finding the right way to produce big dishes. But she had to go through many attempts before it finally looked like success: “The dishes cracked and cracked,” she says. “At a certain point she tried putting paper in the clay and then they did not crack. So I thought I had found the solution.” Then she got busy doing other things and for a period of time she did not work on the dishes. Therefore she was excited to continue working on the dishes when the World On A Dish project arose: “I wanted to decorate the dishes with all sorts of patterns I had thought up through the years
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while being otherwise occupied. I have an overhead projector which makes it possible for me to project motives on to the shapes via the light and I had really been looking forward to making them happen.” But as it turned out when she started working on the dishes again they started cracking even worse than before: “They are large cast things with a complicated production process and they take forever to dry – a month or so. So you see it is not something you test just like that. And it is no good making smaller tests as the size is where the problem lies.” And the porcelain dishes just kept on cracking. “Everybody said to me: ‘Why don’t you just make them out of stoneware and cover them with a porcelain slip afterwards?’ So I tried that – I made them in stoneware at Guldagergaard to match the material of the caryatids. But they cracked far worse than any of the other dishes,” she laughs out loud. The road towards the perfect dish has been winding and full of mistaken attempts this far. But every time something has gone wrong a new and successful product has emerged from the ashes. Not a planned one but more of an extra bonus on the way towards the final goal. “The two twice-fired dishes were actually the only ones that came out right. All other dishes cracked and in the end I was absolutely desperate. I fired three wonderfully printed dishes just before the exhibition but they failed during firing too,” she remembers. “All those cracked dishes – What should I do with them? I had spent months working on them.” When neither the porcelain nor the stoneware dishes seemed to succeed she started considering a third option: Fibre concrete. “It was a material that Richard Saaby, studio manager at Guldagergaard, told me about it. ‘You can glue all sorts of stuff together with fibre concrete’ he told me. And even though I was sceptical at first I decided to put fibre concrete on the pieces of a used support base that had been broken under the weight of a failed dish. And a new shape emerged from it that I found interesting. I have not finished working on it but it is there now as a sketch I can move on with.” At the same time as Ane-Katrine von Bülow was working on the many failed dishes, she had glanced over at the work of another resident working at Guldagergaard. Anja Margrethe Bache was researching concrete matters. “‘Wow, my dish would just be super great in concrete’ I thought. I had the thought earlier that some of my triangular pieces might look great in concrete but I never did anything about it. But then the circumstances turned out to be so fortunate – I was at Guldagergaard, Saaby is a mould expert and Bache was there too. So I thought I wouldd take the chance and try to make a dish out of concrete. I made a plaster model the same size as the fired dish and after the show was over I returned to Guldagergaard where I finished the mould with Saaby’s help. Then we cast a concrete dish and the first try turned out great. I brought it to the annual Crafts Fair in Copenhagen where I managed to get a good price for it which was quite lucky as I did not otherwise sell as much as I usually do. The dish weighed 13 kilos so the next thing I am going to try is to put a lighter core inside it so it is less massive and heavy,” she concludes while her mind is already wandering towards new projects.
Ane-Katrine von Bülow in her home and print studio in Christiana, holding the porcelain net bowl with the blue soda spot. 18 x 36 cm. Photo by Ole Akhøj.
Ane-Katrine von Bülow (1952) is a renowned Danish ceramics artist who established her own studio/shop in 1993. She has been awarded prizes several times and has exhibited all over the world, mainly in Denmark, Europe and Asia. She graduated from the Danish School of Design in 1980 and was an instructor there from 1983 to 2003. (www.anekatrinevonbulow.dk)
Katrine Villadsen has portrayed many ceramics artist during her time as the communications coordinator of Guldagergaard. She now works as a freelance writer. (Guldagergaard: www.ceramic.dk)
CeramicsTECHNICAL No. 34 2014
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