Jason Jacques Gallery artist Michael Geertsen was Comissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to create a Ceramic Installation entitled White Noise for the V&A’s Ceramics Studio and acquired by the V&A in 2012. This dynamic installation, by one of Denmark’s leading ceramic artists, evokes the continual reinvention of form within ceramic art. This commission was made possible through the support of Annie and Otto Detlefs.
Michael describes his inspiration for the exhibition came from the Victoria and Albert Museums Collection:
"Victoria and Albert Museum has one of the largest collections of ceramics in the world – in fact, almost the entire development of our civilization, represented in clay. Actually, half the works at the museum are ceramics. It is going back 6-8000 years. That’s fairly unique, so it seemed an obvious choice to create an installation that referred specifically to the museum’s historical back catalog. The installation has clear references to ceramic archetypes, including a lamp from an Arabian mosque, a medieval pipkin and a Vietnamese rice wine bottle.
My basic concept is an effort to demonstrate that modernism as a form-based expression is not exclusive to the 20th century, as an -ism but has traits that go back much farther in history. For example, you can find modernist elements in Korean ceramics from the 1400s."
