Marit Wollan: What it is to be human

By Maria Sødal Vole | Photos: Marit Wollan

With almost 30 years of experience, Marit Wollan is an accomplished, creative ceramic artist. Based in the lively artist community Kroloftet in Oslo, Wollan’s works focus on exploring emotionality and the multifaceted aspects of human nature.

“Life has taken me in various directions, but I’ve always returned to clay. I always search for tranquillity, and I find that in clay,” Wollan says. “With handcrafted sculptures, you work slowly, and the clay takes the time it needs with drying and firing. It forces me to be patient, and I like that.”

Driven by a fascination with the human condition, Wollan works intuitively. She finds inspiration in human nature with its boundless facets and complexities. As human beings, our rich emotional lives provide plenty of material for artistic exploration. For Wollan, physicality and body language become the starting point for creating abstract shapes in her sculptures.

Marit Wollan in workshop.

“In my ceramic work, I explore what it is to be human. Emotions, moods, how we feel in ourselves, in our relation to others, and within our surroundings,” Wollan explains. “My works are often intuitive reactions to things that happen in my small, intimate world but also expressions of how I and we are affected by global events outside our control.”

Wollan’s work is based more on the emotional world than the intellectual. The creative process is organic for her, with a lot of ideas building on each other or fitting within a bigger framework. “My starting point is often a feeling I want to convey, usually triggered by something I’ve experienced, read, heard, or seen – something that whoever is experiencing the sculpture can recognise. Though our feelings can feel uniquely our own, they’re often quite universal – and sharing them is a way of connecting us,” she explains.

Human nature II.

Seeking out calm in the digital age

Alongside her Bachelor of Arts degree, Wollan’s background is in graphic design and photography. Since 2022, she’s focused almost exclusively on working with clay. “I suppose it’s both an escape from, and a reaction to, a world that worries and sometimes overwhelms me, an increasingly digitalised world where everything moves so fast,” she says. “There’s something timeless about clay – both the techniques we work with and in what we create – it provides a calm and stillness I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. That’s what I try to convey through my sculptures.”

Keeping up with the constant demands and barrage of information of the digital era is difficult and can have a negative effect on mental health. Wollan believes an increasing number of people are now drawing back from overconsumption of digital media and gravitating towards the tangible and sustainable.

“I think part of the reason that ceramics and handicrafts are now more popular than they have been for a long time is that people want space in their everyday lives to get away from digital noise, distraction and mass production – that we consciously or unconsciously seek out the calm and presence of the moment which we often lose in our constant pursuit of more,” she says.

Among Wollan’s most popular items are her worry figures, which she began making during a challenging time in her life. The figures are inspired by the concept of worry stones used to relieve stress and provide calm, a tradition hailing from multiple cultures around the world, such as ancient Greece and Tibet.

The handmade sculptures made of stoneware clay are designed to be picked up and fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. The process of creating the sculptures and experiencing them both relate to being present at the moment, and the weight of the sculptures makes them an excellent tool within the mental health practice of grounding.

“Most of my works eventually turn into some sort of living being. The worry stones were developed into distinctly personified worry friends – someone with whom to share your worries and find focus,” Wollan explains.

Human Nature I.

A vibrant community of artists

Wollan’s professional base is at Kroloftet, a non-profit organisation and art collective in Oslo’s Old Town. “It’s a lovely, unpretentious creative oasis made by artists, for artists,” Wollan says. “Being a self-employed artist can sometimes feel a little solitary. While it provides lots of personal freedom, it takes courage to leap into the unknown without the safety net of a steady job. Discovering Kroloftet and its inhabitants was like finding another home.”

Located by the Alna River in the charming neighbourhood of Etterstad in Oslo, Kroloftet consists of five floors of creatives working in a range of disciplines. The workshop community has recently opened a shop where the artists’ works are showcased. The new culture house Kruttverket can be found next door. The charming space is home to exhibitions, concerts, and occasional Sunday markets and features a bar/café and sauna plus an event space for hire. “It’s a true hidden gem that I would’ve loved to stumble across in a city like Berlin or London,” Wollan says.