“Fire moves in much the same way as water. It seeks the path of least resistance. As a sea of flames surges through the kiln, the fire comes into contact with the ceramics. The flames touch the clay while carrying layers of ash with them, giving wood-fired ceramics their distinctive character.” — Rasmus Rosengaard

In the firing of Rasmus Rosengaard’s ceramics, natural processes do not become a motif, but rather a model for the creation of the works through layering, sedimentation, and transformation. In the artist’s works, this unfolds materially in the surfaces of the clay and glaze, where accumulation and dissolution, solidity and porosity, meet. The surfaces appear as crusts or deposits, evoking both geological formations and archaeological finds, where traces of time emerge through layers of material.

The solo exhibition r.r. u.t. xxxx presents a new series of ceramic works by Rasmus Rosengaard. Building on the artist’s longstanding exploration of structure and materiality in his monochrome paintings, his engagement with surfaces and materials is carried into the three-dimensional form of ceramics. The new series takes the form of urns, fired in a kiln that Rosengaard himself built in his garden adjacent to his studio. It is in this wood-fired kiln that the works acquire their final expression through an interplay between the artist’s intentions and the independent processes of clay, fire, and ash during the firing.

Rasmus Rosengaard’s material-based practice can be understood as an endless accumulation of surfaces. At the same time, the works remain untitled and undated, placing them outside a linear conception of time. They do not present themselves as finished objects, but as material testimonies to the processes through which they came into being. This process-based approach, in which the clay is shaped, fired, glazed, and fired again, allows the material its own agency in the making of the works. The urns thus emerge from a working process characterised by improvisation and an openness to a certain degree of unpredictability and transience, lending them a quality of vanitas—as vessels for time, change, and impermanence.