PAULIINA PÖLLÄNEN

The Crank Index

2 May- 23 June 2024

With The Crank Index, Pöllänen returns to working with free-standing sculpture after several years of researching the relief form through her artistic practice. The new works draw upon from the lineage of figurative sculpture through fragmented representation of the human body and the expressive potential of the material.

Playing on the fetishized notions concerning the body and the material, the slightly abstracted group of sculptures bridge narratives around aspirations and anxieties connected to human mythology. Through the expressive potential of crank clay different conceptions of containment take shape through art historical and anthropological modes. The body is presented through porous, vessel like parts which share stylistic characters with the pioneering female ceramicists of the Viennese Secessionist movement, the natural world, and folklore.

Pauliina Pöllänen (1983, Finland) has a PhD in artistic research from The Art Academy, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen, 2023. In her research project, Porous Worlds – the Liminal Spaces of Relief, she examined the relief, its connections to art, craft, architecture, and ornament, as well as its various dimensions as an artistic medium. She received her MA from the ceramic department of KhiO in 2012, where she currently works as an associate professor.

In recent years Pöllänen has exhibited at the CLAY museum in Denmark, Kunsthall Grenland, Gustavsberg Porcelain Museum and Uppsala Art Museum in Sweden. Her last solo show was the Porous Worlds at the Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen 2023. She has been a resident artist at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2018, and at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia 2016. Her works can be found in the collections of KODE, Nasjonalmuseet, and Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum among other places.

Photo: Carsten Aniksdal