RAINSTONE / Stoneware / 56 cm / 1978
SPHERES / Stoneware / Various dimensions / Part of an installation / Lunds konsthall, Lund, Sweden / 2000
BEETLE / Stoneware / 12 cm / 1985
SHELL / Stoneware / 45 cm / 1990
SPHERES / Stoneware / Various dimensions
SCULPTURES IN A GARDEN SETTING / Stoneware, bronze, iron / Various dimensions
ON KRAITZ
by Gösta LiljaThere is no textbook, no elementary school for those who want to become masters in the art of burning wood and coal in ceramic flame kilns in the old Chinese manner. There are not any usable blueprints of how the old flame kilns should be built. Those who have learned the art have often closed like clams and kept their recipes and secrets.
I have seen a few examples of ceramic masters who have taken a lifetime of hard won experience with them to the grave. This is alchemy, ‘the divine art’, in which the raw and mute clay can be transformed into shimmering and singing goods.
For Ulla and Gustav Kraitz, it is certainly true that, to the creative artist, every day is both a beginning and a rediscovery.
In a brief self-declaration, the Kraitzes once said that they felt a kinship with the Buddhist monk who crossed the Yellow River balancing on a thin stalk of reed.
By that time, they had already been firing their home-built flame kilns for a couple of decades and had waited and watched, anxiously and patiently, for hundreds of burnings.
Time and again, they emerged from the kiln with pieces that would make old Song Chinese burst into a delighted, recognising smile. In 1968, Ulla and Gustav Kraitz moved from Stockholm to Hallandsåsen. This was a significant event for both artists. Here, where the plain extends and spreads out its fields towards Skälderviken, a blue bay far away to the south, lies their chlorophyll-rich paradise in a steep mountain ridge, half wilderness, half cultivation and garden.
This distinctive natural seaside was the perfect breeding ground for their further work. Here, they found their home and workplace, and could build their flame kilns according to the Chinese archetypes they had found. It is in this tangible, one might call it concrete, proximity to the living, growing and primordial that they found their motifs.
What they have created here is something of a ceramic landscape, filled with the forces of life and growth.
Spread out in the park landscape under old beech and fruit trees, the ceramic sculptures have their own quiet existence, commanding attention with their striking colours and glazes and creating a visual richness that is both surprising and impressive. There, in the wet grass it lies, the stone that is a seed – too heavy to be carried by the winds, closed around its core, its germ. And there, under the fruit trees, the enormous fairytale red apples, the primal fruit of good and evil. And over there is an eye stone, with a pupil-like cavity reflecting the clouds like a water mirror (or like a drifting boat, where water and land have changed places). Other strange stones with glazes include greenish grey moss in the humid microclimate of the garden, shell shapes and sea stones.
They are all solid and demand to be touched. At the same time, they are ambiguous and sometimes surrealistically surprising. They subordinate themselves to the landscape, giving it a new, semi-unreal dimension. One sculptural theme that Ulla Kraitz has explored is the bean, a kind of primordial form of life, the embryo, the little human being, enclosed in a film of transparent celadon.
These ascetically summarised forms are to be experienced tactilely, much like a
series of children's sculptures, whose volumes exude a tangible pressure from within. In a final phase, a semi-realistic female torso has been transformed and simplified into an oval body, with only hints of female features in the flowing, light-coloured glaze. It can hardly be a coincidence that it recalls Cycladic idols. Does it not have a charge akin to these primitive symbols? Magic, incantation - words that come to mind when encountering the Kraitz animal sculptures. The older pieces include heraldically prancing horses in cobalt and light celadon, “sea horses”, perhaps related to the earthbound unicorn. The horse also exists in a more realistic version as a powerful torso in celadon and oxblood. A Tang warrior would certainly delight in it! This ceramic art, rooted in reality, reaches its pinnacle in the magnificent bull sculpture with its powerful torso swelling under the tenmoku skin.
What a triumph and joy it must have been for the firing master Gustav to lift that piece out of the kiln.
Later works include a sculpture of a boat with a straightforward, minimalist design comprising two arches and a subtle concave surface. Tilted slightly on a plate, it is conceived as if washed by water.
This version, intended for public spaces, is made of black diabase. It should be placed in a meditation room or a church, not just for its symbolic value, but more for its pure artistic quality. Later (in May 1993), this large boat was also realized as a ceramic sculpture. The firing procedure itself is a masterpiece! With a changed expression, the boat shape is surrounded by the tenmoku lava flows. Faced with Ulla and Gustav Kraitz’s ceramic works, one wonders who made this one and who made the other?
The answer is never clear. A double sculpture juxtaposes a light bean form with a darker one. They can be read as a yin-yang sign, the Taoist symbol for the two principles of existence. The sculpture could be read, if you like, as a confirmation of the Kraitzes’ close collaboration.
“Our work requires both of us; one is not enough,” says Ulla. Indeed. Where do you draw the line between them? The answer seems to be that you don’t. Yin and yang, they both require each other.