Thing, Tang, Trash

Abstract

Stofer produced a series of seven new pieces of work for the international ceramic exhibition ‘Thing, Tang, Trash’ at the Permanenten, The West Norway Museum of Decorative Art, Bergen (2011–-12). The exhibition was initiated by curator and ceramic artist Heidi Bjørgan in a collaboration between Bergen National Academy of the Arts and the Art Museums of Bergen. It was part of ‘Creating Art Value: A Research Project on Rubbish and Readymades, Art and Ceramics’ (www.k-verdi.no), which received support from the Research Council of Norway and was part of the Research Programme on Assigning Cultural Values (KULVER). The frequent closure or relocation of European porcelain factories has created a new situation for everyone who works in the field of ceramics. While studio ceramics used to be the antithesis of industrial production, a new kind of art and design have emerged in which the old oppositions between machine-made/handmade, mass production/singular objects and industry/craft/art no longer apply. Stofer’s works used broken ceramics as a readily available raw material, treating the debris left over in abandoned factories as the raw material for new artistic narratives. The works created expressed his interest in the act of repair and the symbolism associated with broken objects and object re-birth: not so much ‘upcycling’, but seeing the ‘stuff’ we are surrounded with as raw material to build from, intellectually and physically. Stofer presented a paper entitled ‘Biting into a cherry does not prepare you for the stone’ at ‘Making or Unmaking? The Contexts of Contemporary Ceramics’ (Terminus Hall, Bergen, Norway, 2011), a conference organised to coincide with ‘Thing, Tang, Trash’. The exhibition attracted a total of 7,160 visitors. It was reviewed in the Norwegian Art Yearbook 2012 and in Bergens Tidende (2011), and featured in Bergensavisen and Brostein