Turning domestic objects into sculptural art with Into the Green by Marit Tingleff at HB381

HB381 presents Into the Green, a solo exhibition by the Scandinavian ceramic artist ('a painter among ceramicists') Marit Tingleff, on view from May 8 – June 13, 2026. The art exhibition presents a body of new ceramic works that blur the boundaries between sculpture and domestic objects. The Norway-based contemporary artist is known for her expressive treatment of clay surfaces. “Tingleff’s presentation speaks to the various forms of maintenance work associated with the vessel, from production pottery’s repeated contours to domestic work’s tedium: the endless obligation of washing dishes, stacking cupboards and setting the table,” HB381 notes in an official release.

At the exhibition’s centre is Into the Green, Large Plate Rack, an art installation spanning more than nine feet in width. The work consists of 24 oversized circular clay forms arranged like dishes in a drying rack, transforming the kitchenware into sculptural art. Each plate, roughly two feet in diameter, evokes landscapes of moss, water, earth and vegetation through layered glazes.

“In her hands, the dish, which has so often served as a substrate for storytelling and iconography, is stripped down to its essentials as a rough-hewn tablet. Her reserved colour palette gives her work over to an abstract sensibility, whether in the sensation of colour running over clay, streaked and spattered, or as a document of a prolonged engagement with making and unmaking,” the art gallery notes.

"Tingleff applies manganese, cobalt, chromium, and iron oxides over the earthenware clay body, only to selectively wash away sections, leaving a translucent imprint of her actions. As these traces accrete, they leave stains on the surface of the clay. The process of working and reworking, making and unmaking, produces an indeterminate yet complex visual inscription of her daily labour," they continue.

Tingleff’s practice draws from Scandinavian ceramic history, particularly the influence of Thorvald Bindesbøll, whose expressive glaze techniques transformed 19th-century Danish ceramics. “Like Bindesbøll, Tingleff gives preference to thick, reddish earthenware walls that buttress her ceramics with a utilitarian sense of heft. She locates her aesthetic between the richness of layered mark-making and the barrenness of the clay substrate in its unadorned simplicity, a reminder that ceramics is fundamentally a material dug from the earth,” the contemporary art gallery notes.

In an accompanying exhibition essay, design and craft historian Glenn Adamson describes her works as evoking ‘the natural world beyond human-made walls’, where conventional notions of scale and time dissolve. “The pieces are springlike, certainly, bursting with new life, but in actuality their constituent materials and fired forms are eternal, existing on the vast temporal scale of geology rather than botany. All one can say, really, is that Tingleff’s work is in one-to-one relation to itself. It is a map of the complex methods of its own making, a drama already unfolded that we nonetheless can still witness,” Adamson notes.

“Ultimately, Tingleff aims to enter into a dialogue with the material of each dish and vessel, remarking: ‘My painting process is a mixture of spontaneity and slow, patient building up of the surface’. In doing so, she produces what Adamson terms ‘works so capacious that, when you stand before them, they seem to hold all that’s worth knowing’,” HB381 concludes.