MARIANNE NIELSEN

A scientific-like methodology and an interest in the phenomena of the very obvious and the banal, (and often overlooked,) define Marianne Nielsen’s ceramic works. She strives to obtain a visual understanding of what is commonplace, the minutia that surrounds us. How do we perceive hairstyles? How and why does a form become iconic in our common language? For instance the profile and nature of a mountain? What do we read into the shape and color? In flowers? In her works, it is neither the figuration nor narration, as such, that are in focus; instead, it is our own experience and discernment of the subject that is being investigated. Nielsen places our stylistic concepts under a magnifying glass, revealing our re-fashioning of nature into artifice via design and use of color.We become witnesses to a kind of form-grammatical development, as in her close reading and depiction of plant structures. It is not a scientific botanical dissection in a lab, but rather a creation of visual form and rhythm, and interpretation and an ornament.