Hans Vangsø’s powerful pots have a strongly alchemic quality, bowls, jars and bottles that have a potent sense of the geology of clay and the geology of the land, more specifically in his case the texture and individuality of Mols, in north Jutland, where Vangsø lives and works. It is an ancient and remote landscape, and these pots, though they acknowledge the more rugged aesthetic of Japanese wood firing, also have a very Danish sense of form and a Northerner’s potent feeling for his own terrain, both of place and of ceramic history. Born in 1950, Vangsø studied at the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Aarhus from 1972-6, where he was taught by Gutte Eriksen. Like Eriksen, Vangsø is very clearly a ‘fire’ potter, the kiln very much a place of high drama which radically transforms surface and texture. The pot is turned into a kind of landscape of its own.
David Whiting
