Young Norwegian jewellery artists are hitting the international venues with exceptional designs. But – have these artists turned their back on the traditional Norwegian sources of inspiration – the deep forests and rough seas? Why is this new generation so successful? And what has happened before they came along? Read more
Norwegian commissioner appointed to Danish biennial , Norwegian skills in Munich, International fairs and charter – and more, Read more
Clothing designer, shoe designer or furniture designer? Oslo-based Ingunn Birkeland weaves silk ribbons around bodies and rooms, creating an alternative, yet masterfully-styled world. Norwegiancrafts.no was given a glimpse into her painstaking artistic practice and the ideas behind it all. Read more
Tone Vigeland’s art springs from a direct encounter between her hands and her materials. For more than fifty years she has created jewellery and sculptures that combine simple craft techniques with stringent aesthetics – works apparently liberated from any possible intellectual approach. Perhaps this is why people the world over describe her art as both timeless and placeless, and sometimes even magical. Read more
The Norwegian crafts field is focusing increasingly on academic theory and discourse. As an instantiation of this development, Marit Øydegard chairs a round table discussion with Jorunn Veiteberg, Knut Astrup Bull and Jørn Mortensen, on the question of how contemporary crafts are viewed as a distinct field of practice or in relation to fine art. Read more
Richard Sennett’s book ‘The Craftsman’ is becoming an important reference for thinking about crafts in a broader sense. Art critic Kjetil Røed discusses the book as a useful toolkit for further thinking on the relation between the head and the hand. Read more
Research project comes to a close, Konrad Mehus Retrospective, ‘SLUMP – Luck by Chance’ in Arendal, Read more
On 16 November 2011, the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts and the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo held the seminar ‘Home as a Historical and Contemporary Context for arts and Crafts’. Senior Curator Knut Astrup Bull’s lecture at the seminar investigates Kantian and materialist aesthetics in light of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The lecture is here published in full. Read more
Can it be that craft art has no need of a ‘revolution’ or of a shift that a new paradigm per definition results in? Or are we now facing a new paradigm shift? These are among the questions posed in this article, previously published in the catalogue for the travelling exhibition Paradigm. Read more
Artists from five countries collaborate in producing the large traveling exhibition Connecting, showcasing the breadth of arts and crafts in Northern Europe. This article was previously published in Norwegian in the quarterly journal Kunsthåndverk 1, 2011. Read more
Silver Prizes to Trine Hovden and Flora Metamorphicae, 20-year-old gets facelift and international focus, International seminar in Oslo: Home as a historical and contemporary context, Read more
‘The relationship between human beings and machines has been my main focus for the last fifteen years’, says Jens Erland, one of five Norwegians participating in the sixth Gyeonggi International Ceramix Biennale in Korea. Read more