Turi Heisselberg Pedersen: Fragments from a garden is on view at Officine Saffi, Milan
November 9 – December 23, 2022
Fondazione Officine Saffi presents Fragments from a garden, Turi Heisselberg Pedersen’s first solo exhibition in Italy.
Turi Heisselberg Pedersen has been a constant presence on the Danish design scene for more than 20 years. Her career has focused on the vase as an independent sculptural object, with a prolific production based on the concept of seriality. Each object is related to the previous and the next.
Fragments from a garden presents the artist’s recent oeuvre, works inspired by geological structures and crystalline formations. The pieces develop an approach based on fragmented and recomposed nature, objects that reveal the geometric structures complying with natural laws, the lines and trajectories that plants follow in their development, in the phases of growth, according to invisible and eternal harmonic relationships. Just as a sprig of fern, dilated and duplicated, blends with the whole plant, a mountain range will appear equally irregular if we observe it at different scales, up to the point of scrutinising, up close, a single boulder.
“What is a garden beyond fragrant flowers and cultivated beauty? A garden is a whole universe of species that you may not notice or even know exists. We tend to see only the most beautiful examples of existence, pruned into exciting shapes, while we eliminate the ugly items, or those that trigger our phobias. The garden is also soil, water and minerals made from colliding stars. Ecosystems. Cycles. Time. Something that reaches beyond my garden”.
The exhibition is a journey into an abstract geometric landscape, in which every object is related to all the others, and every line, colour and surface is part of an ecosystem. Pedersen’s works should be analysed individually and globally, in other words in the relationships established between forms and spaces. But take another look and you may discover human architecture, artefacts and even the everyday objects around us. These seemingly chaotic geometric shapes thus form the topography of a new world to be explored.
Turi Heisselberg Pedersen was born in Denmark in 1965. She trained at the Kolding School of Design, and she lives and works in Copenhagen. She taught at the Kolding School of Design from 1994 to 2007 and is co-founder of the “Exhibition Room for New Ceramics” in Copenhagen.
Turi’s works can be found in the collections of Musée National de la Ceramique Sevrè, Paris; Musée de la Ceramique, Vallauris, France; Designmuseum Denmark; Danish Arts Foundation; Annie and Otto Johs. Detlefs Foundation, Denmark; the Clay Museum of Ceramic Art in Denmark, and other museums. She has won many international awards, including the Gold Medal – Bayerischer Staatspreis – 2016 and the Annie and Otto Johs. Detlefs Foundation Travelling Grant in 2016.
The exhibition is the result of a collaboration with the Danish Arts Foundation, completing the FOCUS: DENMARK project, a section of the Officine Saffi Award exploring the most interesting expressions of ceramics in Denmark.
Contact
info@officinesaffi.com
Officine Saffi
Via Aurelio Saffi 7
Milan
Italy
Photos by Ole Akhoej. Courtesy of the artist and Officine Saffi.
