By Andreas Brøgger

Morten Løbner Espersen has no intention of escaping from the clay and the territory of applied art. Instead the ceramic tradition appears to function as a soundboard for his works. There are for example parallels with Japanese ceramics, and there is an unmistakable classic Scandinavian dimension in his work with the simple and inevitable forms.

Thanks to the glazes and the interrelated shifts in colour and form, the works have ample material to satisfy the desire for variation. There are variations in the vessel-forms of the objects; variations in the relationship between the form, body and opening of the vessel. Note for example the “crispness” of the thin walls (vase, 1993, p. 32 top), or the “sharpness” of the tall sides (#143 a. o., 1995, p. 34). Note how the works are given increased weight and concreteness as Espersen increases the thickness of the body by as much as several centimetres. Crucial too is the relationship between the opening of the jar and the sharply cut-off form of the body or softer, slightly uneven undulations (note the difference between the 1998 series, pp. 45-49, and the latest series from 1999, pp. 57-61). The discreet displacements in the relationship between the inner and the outer form, between the outer walls which rise to delineate the profile of the work and the drop down along the inner walls, a drop that can be steep and deep, dramatic, secretive (as in #637, 1999, p. 60); or the inside curve may be a soft, inviting roundness that almost already seems to embrace any objects one might put in it (see for example #622, 1999, p. 59); the wider the diameter of the opening in relation to the height of the object, the more “openness” becomes part of the meaning of the object (as in #234, 1996, p. 36, and #395, 1998, p. 46).

Most striking, though, are the richly varied surface qualities of Espersen’s output. They are worth an extended analysis because their importance to our experience is so interesting, if hard to pinpoint. The many layers of glaze run, trickle, create hills and folds, wear holes in themselves and allow the fired clay to appear, form bubbles that burst and become small holes; thin-flowing glazes spread like an almost transparent film over the other glazes, the thick-flowing ones gather in full blobs or drops that have later hardened.

Morten Løbner Espersen’s ceramic works look different depending on the angle you see them from, the way the light falls on them. The light is reflected and glistens on the smooth, glossy surfaces of the glaze. It gathers in the hollows, vanishes entirely in the folds and tiny grottos. Indeed, it is as if the richly varied surfaces embrace the light, as if the light is formed into things, and precisely these ways in which the light settles around the object and is formed by it are, as we know, one of the most important sources of our expectations about how it would feel to touch it. The materiality is an important reason why Espersen’s works activate a kind of “bodily vision” – bodily in relation to the passing instant it takes just to extrapolate a form from “its object”. The textures, the surfaces of the glaze, are what make Espersens’s works into something more than just perfected ideal forms – in fact into incarnated forms, objects with concreteness and weight.

If we can experience a surface, purely visually, as soft or knobbly, smooth and cold, this is because our vision has learned from our hands. In other words it is not only our vision that senses when we see; the other senses partake in the looking – that is, when there is something for the eyes to feel, something material. Form and materiality are familiar to all our senses, not only sight and touch (to understand an object with closed eyes, we have to infer its form, for example). Our sensory perceptions of tastes, sounds and smells also take on forms (we talk about “roundness”, “full body”, “softness”); and tastes, sounds and smells can have various “surfaces” and material qualities (we talk about “dryness” and “rasping” in taste and sound, and about “sharp” smells). Forms and material qualities thus not only belong to sight, but are general categories which interact among the senses, indeed infect the senses with impressions from one another. This is why it is by no means misleading when, although far from the things themselves, we cannot help sensing the grainy, cold, rough or smooth surfaces on the ceramic objects shown in this book. The two-dimensionality of the pictures perhaps does not even prevent us from sensing the “sounds” of their texture, or seeing their “smells”. We speak of sensuous works with which we have no real contact except through the eye. We are not even in the same room, and yet in a certain sense we hold the works we see in our hands.

Extract from the article "Work in hand" in the book

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