KVT – Ode to an Urn-Made in Vietnam

KVT follows the adventures of Maritta Nurmi’s very tall vase from a Bat Trang kiln to a Helsinki museum

Last year, Maritta Nurmi, successful artist and long term Finnish expat living in Hanoi was invited to put forward a proposal for a single work to go in an exhibition of fine art by 8 women artists living and practicing in Vietnam. Six were Vietnamese nationals, one a Viet Kieu, and Maritta the only non Vietnamese (though many Vietnamese artists have accepted her as one of their own since she studied with a lot of them, as a mature age student, at the Fine Art University in Hanoi)

Maritta has never been an artist who rests on well deserved laurels and constantly puts herself in the way of all sorts of personal angst by throwing caution to the winds and adapting to all sorts of art mediums.

This time it was ceramics

Not that she hasn’t been a keen observer of the artistic ceramic industry in Hanoi and of several artists who have gone to local pottery centers such as Bat Trang and Phu Long and pushed and pulled at clay and glazes with varying degrees of success.

Maritta wasn’t so much into the pushing and pulling….she was determined to master aspects of glazing….and not for Maritta a small ceramic thing to glaze… no she had her eyes on one of those vases -taller than a person- to decorate and fire in a kiln.

So off to Bat Trang she bussed

……and found herself under the accommodating wing of a family that were commercial glazers but who were happy to adopt a Tay who at least would provide a lot of visual fun as she started from scratch, determined to get from go to whoa in a matter of a couple of months.

She experimented with the glazes commonly and traditionally used at Bat Tran on a variety of small thrown objects and after many of those tear your hair out moments when you see your experiments taken from the firing kiln resembling school kid efforts, she suddenly found that she was really into it……and many early pieces (I couldn’t resist buying the ceramic stool from her) became collectable pieces with some pertinent symbols from her work- such as the barking gecko – cavorting over them

Now it was onto the real thing and with lots of valuable advice from her hosts and other local potters she got under way determined to save hair she hadn’t already pulled out

She found out ways to sculpt her trademark roses onto a vase and have it come out of the firing kiln unbroken

Then it was the exasperating process of painting her artistic life story onto the vase in glazes that she had to cross her fingers about and hoped they worked as she visualized. The partially adorned beauty seen below next to a collection of vases painted by local maestros in traditional vein and waiting for Maritta’s to join them in the kiln

Motifs special and peculiar to Maritta’s art work gradually covered the vessel

And with desperately crossed fingers she saw it placed into its fiery oven and had a few anxious days to wait for the cooling down and the unveiling …..And …there it was! Un-cracked, unblemished, colors as prescribed

Ready to be carefully transported to the Goethe Institute to be photographed for the exhibition catalogue with only a couple of days to spare

And where, when the exhibition opened, it reigned as empress over all.

With this image by Hoang Duc Thinh illustrating its complex beauty

After a few months of standing around in dark places gathering and occasionally being ooohed and aaahed over by wanna be buyers, a call came from The Finnish Association of Designers for the work to be exhibited at the Design Museum in Helsinki as one of 66 ceramic works by 43 prominent artists chosen from a long list of 497 works and 144 artists. This was not an invitation or occasion be sneezed about!

CERAMICS IN SPACE – CERAMIC ART REVIEW 2014

The Finnish Association of Designers Ornamo will be organizing the first review of contemporary Finnish ceramics in 2014. Ornamo is responsible for project production, overall administration and coordination between the parties involved. The partners are Association of Finnish Sculptors and the Design Museum. Aalto University will be organizing international conference The Art of Research 26.–27.11.2014 in cooperation with the project.

Today’s artists make innovative use of ceramics in their art. The objective of the project is to attract interest in ceramic art among the general public and the media. The exhibition will highlight the diversity of ceramics and the richness of the material as used in Finnish fine arts and architecture.

The final cut for the prestigious exhibition had works that were cast, broken, illustrated, or constructed with other media and comprised a rather fabulous selection of ceramica ranging from those that highlighted traditional practices to those that radically broke with tradition.

The curators and judges stated that the body of work represented the history and perspectives of ceramics in their time and place. Importantly some works were sociopolitical in that the material acted as a social mirror, and also an ironic statement of the environment we live in..

They lauded the art works, initially chosen from professional photographs, for their beauty, their sometimes grotesque humor, and for the possibilities they provided for meditation and questioning

But before any of this could eventuate and the vase find a new admiring audience for Maritta in Helsinki and her home land, she had to try to keep attached to her hair as she and a transport company worked out how to transport the fragile vessel.

and more fingers and toes were crossed and kept crossed from the time the vase was crated until word arrived from the museum that she (I think of the vase as a she creature) had been opened to expose
itself intact and alluring.

On the 10 October the exhibition officially opened and Maritta and her vase shone again in both their deliciously eccentric ways

And the vase will remain on show until January 1, 2015, an impressive empress again

And a brief look at a few of the other 66 works I was able to cull from the internet