3. Juni 2012 - New Ceramics

She made thrown functional stoneware, lots of plates, casseroles,
teapots, bowls, cups. They were decorated with very fine
brushwork with engobes which of course came from her Danish
background. Glazes were in typical La Borne spirit, of lavender
ash or grapevine ash that fired to thick, milky, bluish creamy
glazes. Charlotte and Svein opted for the magical woodfiring, it
meant many hours of hard work of splitting wood and firing;
but the results were very rich, satisfactory surfaces.
Between 1978 and 1980 Charlotte went back to Denmark to
teach at the Aarhus Kunstakademi, where she had studied. Nevertheless,
she chose to return to La Borne to settle for good..
After about 20 years of functional ware made of Berry grès,
Charlotte's work started to show changes, became more personal;
influences of her native country becoming apparent in her
work. She made big flat dishes incorporating fine hand formed
flat fish heads, and sculpted lobsters on the edges; memories of
her childhood at the seaside started surfacing on her pieces.
Several years later, a rather logical new development came
about. At this time, her work was becoming less and less functional
and more and more sculptural She was no longer satisfied
with making heads of animals appearing on the side of
a pot, but started making standing animals. The animals she
chose to create were not the animals around us, not our usual
She still loves doing these. Her solely sculptural
animal pieces grew in size, some of them
as big as 110 cm in height.
Ibex, stoneware, modelled, slip,
gas fired, h 35 cm, 2009
CHaRLOTTe POuLSen
house pets, but fierce, gracious, proud creatures with long legs
and necks, alert, with attentive ears; they were inhabitants of
Charlotte's dreams of far away lands and places which she
would have loved to visit, but had not. Giraffe, okapi, zebra
and alpaca were her models for about ten years.
This transition from functional to sculptural work was not
from one day to other. Charlotte still made jugs that were usable
but with a giraffe neck, or a teapot with a zebra body.
She still loves doing these. Her solely sculptural animal pieces
grew in size, some of them as big as 110 cm in height. These
animal sculptures are usually partly thrown, like the legs and
the neck, then altered and the rest hand built. While she was
using La Borne grès for her thrown ware, for her animal work
she experimented with different clay varieties with grog like the
clay from Mehun, the Dutch Vingerling and Spanish clays, for
their strength and different surface possibilities. She fires the
animal sculptures in her one-and-a-half cubic metre wood kiln,
in order to attain natural looking rich surfaces.
And yet again Charlotte has a need to make new work. She
has been making solid standing animals for about ten years.
Now it is her desire to liberate, create lightness, and movement,
like an effortless dance of birds in the skies. Birds have always
fascinated her in her past and present life. She wants to catch
the swaying movement of their “dance“ in her clay.
This new work is made in two parts. She makes a base from a
rough clay slab that has been in-laid and treated with engobes,
stretched by throwing on a surface to create fissures and cracks,
then modelled into an abstract standing base. This part is sometimes
made of black-firing clay. Then the upper, the flying,
May / June 2012 NEW CERAMICS 13
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