IRENE NORDLI - My Hands Just Keep Getting Bigger

My Hands Just Keep Getting Bigger is a monograph published by arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart, in collaboration with Hostler Burrows, New York. This book offers a focused look at the evolution of Irene Nordli’s sculptural practice over the past thirty years.

Irene Nordli (Norwegian, b. 1967) is a leading figure in contemporary Scandinavian ceramics. She forms clay into convulsive vessels, complex assemblages freighted with wrinkling folds and amorphous ribbons of matter that cause them to sag, stretch, and falter. There is something akin to an oracle’s divination at work in her practice, offering up the entrails of our cultural detritus for inspection and interpretation. Exquisitely produced, her intricate sculptures turn the body inside out, inviting viewers to contemplate the unformed and reviled: intestinal coils and slabs of clay modeled as if they were composed of the interior membranes of the body. Nordli’s porcelain vases and closed ceramic forms are mottled with an array of copper-rich flambé glazes; their pristine exterior surfaces, stained with shades of oxblood, reveal hollow cavities and viscera. Red sang-de-boeuf glazes pool against bone-white porcelain. The flecks of crimson appear to flay the objects, producing a hybrid image somewhere between ceremonial vase and modern body horror. As such, they offer a grisly foil to the minimalist simplicity of mid-century design. 

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