LIME
Morten Løbner Espersen
Blue Garden
Geer Pouls
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Sculpture / 2010 / 47 x 36 cm / clay
Morten Løbner Espersen makes vessels, many of them cylindrical; a form he describes as “the simplest of shapes… harmonious, precise and neutral.” In 2000 he mounted his first show of cylindrical vessels in Stockholm, and five years later, whilst continuing to experiment with various other forms, decided henceforth to concentrate predominantly on the mute simplicity of the cylinder. Within this self-imposed limit, Espersen has forged a large vocabulary from the proportional relationships between opening and height. At one end of the scale are circular bases with walls only marginally higher than those of a lily pad – at the other are slender tubes over fifty centimetres high.
With this formal neutrality Espersen weds something altogether more expressionistic, as he describes, “I let the glazes invade the simplicity, and the numerous layers of glaze create the chaotic surface, in all varieties and textures.” Thus, he strives quite deliberately for ‘undesirable’ effects, welcoming craters, pinpricks and bubbles – a recent small dark green pot, for instance, contained huge pustules of glaze, like a witches’ cauldron in miniature.
Espersen makes great play of this admixture of chaos with purity. Certain of his surfaces appear to have been attacked by an exotic virus, blossoming in fleurs de mal deformations, mixing floridity and disease, as compelling in their liquidity and colour as infected wounds. In some pots it is as though the organic forms of an Axel Salto ‘budding’ vessel have entered an advanced state of decay: in others, as though a hallucogenic microscope has massively magnified Lucie Rie’s volcanic surfaces.
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Espersen was born in Aalborg, Denmark in 1965, and his fascination with clay began as a schoolchild. He recalls finding himself spellbound when his teacher threw pots on the wheel, and chose ceramic classes whilst his friends were involved in rather more prosaic activities, such as bicycle repair classes. From the outset he found working with clay great fun, and his grandmother formed a collection of the things he made from kindergarten onwards. When she died he was able to review everything that he had made as a youngster.
After school, Espersen underwent six months of general art training at the School of Graphic Arts at Aarhus, from where he went on to study ceramics at the School of Applied Arts in Copenhagen. This he remembers as, “Very demanding, lots of tuition, many teachers, and a full programme. Days started at nine, and lasted until five, and
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Exhibition Geometry gives us a sense of stability that we often miss in life
