Tingleff & Britton at Marsden Woo
Norwegian ceramist Marit Tingleff is showing work alongside her British contemporary Alison Britton at London’s Marsden Woo Gallery (until 14 November)
Although well-known in her native Scandinavia, this is Tingleff’s first major UK exhibition and it’s fitting that it should be a joint show with Alison Britton. Both come from the generation which emerged from art school in the 70s determined to re-position ceramics as a serious, independent art practice.
Tingleff makes large-scale, dramatic painted plates. Their form makes a nod to domestic pottery but they’re clearly non-functional – some are as large as 1.5 metres wide. Full of vitality, they’re decorated with striking abstract designs, showing Tingleff’s interest in the painterly uses of glaze. She obviously enjoys balancing areas of light and shade, pattern and empty space and playing with different ways of mark-making. The pieces work well with Britton’s, although Edmund de Waal says, ’This [exhibition] is not a conversation, a polite give and take between two artists. It is more vivid, more plural.’ But they share the same energy and passion, and the same happiness to accomodate the random which as de Waal says, makes for an exhibition that is both liberating and exhilirating.
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