Soft/Shell - Crafting the Contemporary

Presenting works by
Isabel Berglund, Frances Goodman, Peter Holst Henckel, Jakob Hunosøe, Ellen Hyllemose, Signe Jais,
Svend-Allan Sørensen and Thordis Erla Zoëga

January 17 – February 14, 2026.

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Soft / Shell – Crafting the Contemporary brings together works by eight artists exploring original approaches to a variety of materials. Combining traditional crafts with new technology and materials more often found in other fields of work and various industries, the exhibition presents works which are both soft and porous, stringent and organic, random and specific.

The exhibition Soft/Shell – Crafting the Contemporary foregrounds material-based practices, where craftsmanship, technique, and process are not only tools but forms of knowledge in themselves. Crafting is understood as a mode of thinking and of experience. In a time marked by acceleration and digital abstraction, the work insists on tactility, and on emphasizing the unnoticeable.

Jakob Hunosøe explores the inherent properties and shapes of mundane objects. Through construction, balance, and precision, his analogue photographic works become abstract shapes and formal studies, often leaving the viewer with a sense of something unreal and magic. The use of materials which are mundane and not precious is also a point of focus in the works by Ellen Hyllemose. Chipboard, masonite and lycra form impressions and concepts of experienced landscapes — lived and sensed spaces translated into displaced, material structures. The landscape is not a motif, but an experience embedded in material.

Svend-Allan Sørensen merges traditional woodcut techniques with contemporary laser-cutting processes. The combination of the hand’s slow work and the logic of digital precision result in works where time, technology, and craft are visibly present elements of the image. Ceramic seed pods by Peter Holst Henckel possess qualities that are both organic and porous, as the hard, yet fragile material emphasizes the organic motif and vice versa.

Frances Goodman employs ornamentation and endless repetition as strategies that seduce us with dizzying surfaces of color and shine. Her sequin paintings become active spaces for investigations of contemporary desire. Color and reflection in relation to light, space, and the viewer’s movement, are also in focus as Thordis Erla Zoëga uses dichroic film and acrylic glass in her works. Light is a crucial factor, as light is filtered through them and adds a constantly changing experience to the works.

More organic and wildly Isabel Berglund works with knitting as both technique and structural system. The soft material is explored as a bodily form that can expand, give way, and bear traces of time and labor. And coming from a more stringent and controlled starting point, Signe Jais adds poetic fragility to her mathematical explorations in carefully choreographed thread on vintage paper and cardboard.

Altogether, Soft / Shell – Crafting the Contemporary suggests how various materials and crafting techniques can function as soft yet resilient shells around the ways we inhabit and understand the world.