Ritual Play

Grief and joy walk together

By Emmeli Rolleberg

Ritual Play is about exploring existing rituals for death, burial and the afterlife, and in this search I found anchors in time and beliefs that resonate with my own artistic practice. It is about reflecting on the human idea of the soul, and my own wish for a spiritual realm. Around the globe religions and rituals have evolved independently of each other yet there are commonalities. Death is universal, and so seems the need for rituals be as well. And ritual objects are our material bridge to come closer to the spiritual realm.

During this project I have created my own ritual objects in a ritual play. Three objects for the past, present and the future, for the mind, body and soul. The urn, the stone and the portal. I am calling them Keeper, Key and Contact. The vessel is the keeper, its mother and carer. Stones are keys to memories and lost connections, to the ones that are gone but not forgotten, and a portal for contact, or perhaps just a glimpse. These objects speak of both grief and joy, eventually everything dies to leave space for new life.

Artist Statement

Throughout history death has been a source of terror and fascination and we are always seeking answers to the unanswerable questions of life and death. I am exploring this tension through working with ceramics. I am interested in the objects used in rituals surrounding death and transformation, and why this need for objects is so strong, when spirituality is beyond the object. I create ceramic objects that reflect my wish for a spiritual realm. I mirror rituals through history and comment on our current relationship with death.

For me the vessel symbolises life, from a mothers womb to fathers tomb. The vessel is earth, its mother and carer, creator and keeper, a final resting place or a ship to the other side. It also has a strong connection with ancestors who carried food and water in ceramic pots, and on some occasions and in some locations, buried their dead in them. Through my ceramic works I am finding ways to be at ease with mortality, to understand the need for rituals, but most importantly, to feel a connection with my spirituality.

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Connection

The Idea of the contact portal comes from an old Swedish folk tradition of pulling sick children through naturally occurring holes in trees to cure illness. This portal is to act like a connection with an invisible place or state. That contact could happen when you pass through it, it could also be when exchanging looks from either side, or passing an object through the portal, hence charging the object with contact. The ropes they are hanging from also carry meaning. When we lose someone close knots are tied in our bodies, in our hearts and throats. I believe these knots can loosen if we acknowledge them, and they may loosen or even leave if we tie knots elsewhere.

Keeper

The vessel comes with many associations, and the urn specifically. For many cultures the urn symbolises a seed, or a womb, and burial is seen as a rebirth. For me its symbolises life, the Bara people of Madagascar phrase it well with the saying “from mothers womb to fathers tomb”. The urn is mother, it is earth. It is the keeper of goods and protector of memories, it is a final resting place, fathers tomb or a ship to the other side. The keeper is simply keeping all that I need it to keep, that I cannot cary by myself. The indention on its shoulders symbolises it being weighted on for a long time. Like how memories leave marks on our person, or how our bodies leaves marks in our mattress.

Key

The stones act as keys to memories and emotions, by the number that I have given some of them, numbers that to me hold meaning. For example nr 365 is the psalm Grief and joy walk together, or nr 1991, thats the year my dad and his mother died, but also by their feel, smooth stones I collected in my pockets as a kid. To some orthodox jews, stones are much preferred to flower for putting on graves, since stones are a symbol of permanence while flowers are so obviously ephemeral.

Programme director MA Craft, Katarina Andersson

Visiting Address:

HDK-Valand
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8

411 37 Göteborg

Post address:

HDK-Valand
Box 131, 405 30 Göteborg

Phone Number:

031-786 0000 (vxl)

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Anna Tegeström Wolgers
Professor of Craft, Textile Art

Anna T. Wolgers works across multiple disciplines in arts and craft. For the last 15 years Anna has worked mainly in the textile field exploring the semiotics of textiles and their narrative values. Textile materials, tactile and visual recognition are elements that Wolgers works with.

Wolgers has participated in numerous international and national exhibitions including public commissions and collaborative works with museums, where she has curated projects/exhibitions. Wolgers is chairwoman of the textile network Fiber Art Sweden

Email:

www.fiberartsweden.nu
www.annatw.se
www.kasiden.se

Dr. Jessica Hemmings Professor of Craft Vice-Prefekt of Research Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honors) in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA (Distinction) in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, is published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: the Voice of Cloth (2008). In 2010 she edited a collection of essays titled In the Loop: Knitting Now published by Black Dog and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Bloomsbury) and wrote Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury). Her editorial and curatorial project, Cultural Threads, is a book about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury: 2015) accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015-2017). Jessica is a member of the Editorial Board of Textile: the journal of cloth & culture (Taylor & Francis) and Craft Research (Intellect). She is currently Professor of Craft & Vice-Prefekt of Research at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the 2020-2021 Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands. Email:

www.jesicahemmings.com

Yuka Oyama PhD
Professor of Craft, Jewellery Art

Yuka Oyama is a Japanese-German artist who grew up in Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, USA and Germany. Oyama’s artistic practice incorporates sculpture, jewellery, video, photography, public interventions, choreographic experimentations and performances.

Her life-sized, wearable sculptures, object-human hybrids – objectified humans and personified objects – display disconnections often felt in contemporary life: the degeneration of human-to-human emotional communication and our sense of belonging. Oyama employs everyday objects to upset these disconnections, facilitating our ability to act beyond set conventions.

Oyama was one of the core members of the artistic research, Critical Costume 2000 -Costume Agency (2020) based at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where she acted as the curator and the creative director. Oyama’s research considers critical adornments, material culture, and identity.

Email:

www.yukaoyama.com
www.costumeagency.com

Katarina Andersson Photo_ Karin Björkquist

Katarina Andersson
Senior Lecturer and Programme Director MA Craft

Katarina Andersson is a senior lecturer and since 2016 is the programme director for MA Craft. She is an artist and designer and her work extend between sculptural objects and tableware. Ceramics and glass are her main materials. Her work involves both semiotics, the relation between materials, objects in relation to space and objects as mediators.

Katarina Andersson has worked as a curator and project leader for various craft projects. She was previously senior lecturer at Konstfack at the Ceramic and Glass department, where she led the pilot project in artistic research Keramiska väggmaterial i offentlig miljö.

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