Ceramic artist Bente Skjøttgaard’s and fashion designer Anne Damgaard’s distinctly different artworks are presented in a close interplay, tied together by a shared underwater theme that unfolds in fluid shapes and colours. Skjøttgaard’s large ceramic abstractions on nature contain references to jellyfish and other marine species captured in fluid motion, while Damgaard’s sculptural textile constructions include transparent materials and seaweed as well as experiments with photographic shadow images that produce a shimmering sensation of light under water.

The two artists’ collaboration springs from a common artistic approach driven by experimental lightness. They both work with clear formal contrasts, such as gravity versus lightness and taut structure versus the dissolved and diffuse. Each in their way, they also both challenge the relationship between spontaneity and control and allow chance to play a deciding role. Damgaard’s work is based on basic geometric shapes that are cut into gauzy textiles, which are then draped and hung in a varying interplay of lines, while Skjøttgaard hands a measure control to the high temperatures in the kiln during firing, allowing gravity and the flow of the glazes to influence the outcome.