KaosClay: The calm inside the chaos

By Signe Hansen

In Tina Skarregaard Astrup’s ceramic world, sweetness and unease sit side by side. Small flowers, gentle figures and animals share space with hybrid creatures, raw surfaces and forms that can be beautiful and unsettling at once. After decades of making, teaching and returning to clay, she has now taken the leap to establish KaosClay, a full-time art practice.

A human face seems to continue the scream – or roar – of a polar bear wrapped around it; on its sides, Greenlandic flora provides a quaint contrast to its rage. Like many of Astrup’s works, Inuit began not with a finished idea, but with a mouth shaped in a moment of anger. “I was incredibly angry, so I went down and made this mouth that was just screaming,” she recalls. “I then left it for a long time, and when I returned to it later, I had recently been to Greenland.

Suddenly I saw an Inuit figure, someone strong and angry, and the animal and symbols of nature grew out of that.” The intensity of such works is only one side of KaosClay. Alongside the more surreal sculptures are flowers, small female figures and gentle animals, reflecting Astrup’s equally strong attraction to colour and beauty. The flowers in particular appeal to a broad audience and are among her most popular works.

Heaven or hell.

A long way back to clay

Astrup first encountered clay at primary school, and once she had the material in her hands, she was smitten. Growing up with a mother who was a practising artist, it was natural for her to use art to both communicate and find calm, and in her early 20s she went to an art-focused folk high school, where she became fully absorbed in clay and particularly sculptural work. Yet, rather than pursue ceramics professionally, she trained as a textile designer, choosing what she considered a safer, more stable path.

Inuit.

Still, sculpture remained part of her life through courses, her own work and later teaching art and ceramics. Eventually, however, teaching others just reinforced her own need to immerse herself more deeply in making. “I can have an enormous number of thoughts, and sitting down to create gives me this incredible sense of calm,” she says. “I disappear into another world. That’s also where the name KaosClay comes from.”

KaosClay: The calm inside the chaos

Building from the inside out

Today, Astrup’s textile approach lives on in her use of slab-building, constructing hollow sculptures from separate pieces of clay. “I make patterns and build the form from different pieces, so it’s hollow from the beginning,” she explains. “Then I can start modelling and working on the small details.”

Those details range from delicate to deliberately uncomfortable. Astrup is drawn to tactile surfaces resembling skin or wounds, finding beauty in forms that can initially appear unsettling. Elsewhere, humans, animals and natural elements merge into surreal figures. “The flowers are more about something beautiful and sensory,” she says. “The larger sculptures are different. Sometimes I can feel that there’s something that needs to come out.”

Otium.

Taking the leap

Although ceramics has followed Astrup for most of her adult life, she only began exhibiting seriously around three years ago. At her first exhibition, she sold all the works she had brought with her, giving her the confidence to follow an ambition that had long remained in the background. “I had always had this dream in the back of my mind, but I didn’t have the confidence to say, ‘Here I am,’” she says. “Then I finally started exhibiting, received an incredible response, and now I’ve decided to commit myself 110 per cent to my art.”

The next step will take Astrup to Guldagergaard, where she has received a grant-funded residency for November and December. During the stay, she plans to explore the völva figure, Nordic history and mythology through hybrid, surrealist sculptures connecting nature with the spiritual. “I like the thought that there’s something more than the everyday world we see,” she says. “When I disappear into a sculpture, I find that space – and that’s what I try to express through surrealism.”

The work of Tina Skarregaard Astrup can currently be seen at Dronninglund Kunstcenter, where she is exhibiting until 1 November.