HB381 will be exhibiting at Untitled Art, Miami Beach with a solo presentation of sculpture by contemporary Danish artist Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen.

Pontoppidan Pedersen’s work is an investigation into ideas of interconnectedness across time and species. She is deeply concerned with values of affection, kindness, and kinship, and offers her sculpture as a vehicle for communion. The theme of kinship is central to the philosophies of ecofeminist Donna Haraway—whose writing is a significant point of reference and inspiration to Pontoppidan Pedersen—and guides much of the artist’s approach to the vessel as communicator. She immerses herself in Haraway’s “SF creatures” (speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, string figures), breathing her own fables into the sculpted forms born from the earth. Pontoppidan Pedersen’s work is marked by a profound sense of connectivity, both within the realms of her own intellectual and instinctual consciousness, and that of the physical and temporal universe at large. In the words of Donna Haraway, “human beings are not in a separate compost pile.”

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen was born in 1987 in Skive, Denmark, and is now based outside of Silkeborg. Her work is inherently pluralistic, concerned with notions of care and kinship as they extend to the “more than human” — the interspecies realms and relationships we participate in. By pulling from ideas of Ecofeminism and Norse mythology, she fertilizes a distinctly feminine paradigm, diverging from hyperactivity to work instead from a place of freedom and intuitive chaos. Her physicality is visible, fossilized, as she pushes, coils, pinches and layers clay on a human scale, infusing it directly with her energy. By embodying a cycle of theoretical and political composting, she reimagines a speculative future marked by a clear departure from the historically governing and formulaic rules of Danish ceramics.

Pontoppidan Pedersen’s work has been exhibited throughout Europe, and is in the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Designmuseum Denmark, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, and the Danish Arts Foundation, among other institutions. She has been the recipient of numerous grants from Danish foundations for the arts throughout her career.