"Pernille Pontoppidan graduated from the Royal Danish Academy’s School of Design
on Bornholm in 2012 and has distinguished herself with her free and insistent formal
vocabulary. In her architectural objects in ceramics, she investigates the relationship
between construction, limitation, balance and not least between beauty and ugliness.
The objects are complex stacks of varied ceramic elements, some of them roughly
fabricated, others squeezed out of a tube, in the same way that materials such as
concrete and marble intermingle and produce a confusing picture. The works often
give off an air of ramshackle buildings. Alternatively, they can be seen as exuberant
but clumsy cakes, where the baker has not had the mixing ratios, baking time or
consistencies under control. It is all sizzling and bubbling and on the verge of coming
tumbling down. Pernille Pontoppidan works consciously with the aesthetics of
ugliness precisely in order to make the beautiful visible. At Tommerup she has
modelled her architectural sculpture up layer by layer, allowing a uniquely winding
and labyrinthine building to spring forth. Here she has created her largest ceramic
construction to date, a 1.7-metre-tall sculpture, in which a number of levels tower
up one over the other, each with enigmatic niches and rooms."