PAST
CAMILLA THORUP
Omen
November 17, 2023 - January 13, 2024
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In SPECTA, Camilla Thorup opens her new solo exhibition Omen, a presentation of ceramic hybrids and elements revolving around our both connectedness and alienation to nature. With enlarged snails, fruits in both decay and sprouting and hybrids of nature and human, Omen unfolds a world of figures that are both recognizable but also leave us in doubt: Are we really in control or does nature take its course, regardless of what we do?
Once we were fiddling
creepy crawlies
Now they dump garbage
in the depths of the sea
and stores in pits
of salt and lead
the substances that make us
into creepy crawlies again.
Metamorphosis, poem by Halfdan Rasmussen from the book "The Future is Over", 1985
The poem Metamorphosis by the Danish poet Halfdan Rasmussen very simply describes our being in the world as a well-known cycle of evolution and development. And it holds a critique of our overwhelming use of nature and ultimately our own deterioration. In the past, nature was perceived as passive and devoid of value, as a space for Man's boundless dominance. With a galloping climate crisis and a worldwide Covid pandemic, the close inter-dependence and impact that exists between Man and nature has become clear to most. It is our connectedness with nature that the exhibition focuses on.
We know infinite images of still life throughout the history of art: tables with fruits and candles and sometimes with stages of decay and maybe a small snail. They are reminders of the liability to perish - both nature's and our own - and put beauty, nurture and life into perspective. In the same way, Camilla Thorup works with juxtapositions that point to nature’s life cycle and connections between sprout, fruit, consumption and death, in order to become life again. With that focus on the endless cycle of nature, Thorup mixes animals, mushrooms, fruits and humans in figurative ceramic figures in a way where we look both back and forward and at times do not know what stage we are in. Are the hairy babies a relic of the past or are they an omen of a new condition in an unknown future? And will the everyday objects of our time be found in the future, whole and complete, as the indestructible materials they are from - now inhabited by barnacles?
Omen is not an eerie and dark exhibition about the end of the world, rather an exhibition about the extent to which we experience connectedness with nature, about how we are or can become one with it, and see snails, mushrooms and decay as part of the cycle, that gives new life.
Camilla Thorup (DK, 1976) was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. She has participated in countless exhibitions, e.g. Horsens Art Museum (solo), Himmerlands Art Museum (with Birgitte Støvring), at Sophienholm, Vejle Art Museum and since 2009 in SPECTA. Over the years, Camilla Thorup has curated a number of exhibitions and she has done public commissions a.o. at a school in Amager, Cph. and at Kastrupgårdsamlingen. In the fall of 2024, Camilla Thorup will exhibit solo at CLAY – Ceramics Museum Denmark in Middelfart.
Camilla Thorup: Pear with Moths, 2023, glazed stoneware
