The exhibition White to Earth presented Marte Johnslien’s final exhibition as a research fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) and its Art and Craft department. Johnslien’s artistic research project, titled Circumstantial Sculpture, was a multifaceted and experimental investigation of sculpture, with a particular focus on ceramic materials and objects. Underlying her work is the conviction that art, because of its ability to express both connections and interstitial spaces, may be persuasively used to illuminate the relationships that exist between specific materials and phenomena.
The project White to Earth was presented at ROM Oslo in February 2020. As the title indicates, two series of ceramic sculptures reveal the aesthetic and conceptual investigations of the colour pigment titanium dioxide’s (TiO2) origin and its way of interacting with other materials.TiO2 is studied through its history and its materiality, where in the final stage – the ceramics – the material returns to an earthly state.
The publication White to Earth was published on the occasion of the exhibition Hvitt til jord at ROM, Oslo. The publication contains a text by Marte Johnslien about the titanium dioxide industry and its impact on the modern world together with the artists’ photographs from the ilmenite quarries Titania AS in Sokndal and the titanium dioxide factory Kronos Titan AS in Fredrikstad, and photographs of details of ceramic sculptures.
Marte Johnslien has continued her artistic research on titanium dioxide in her project TiO2: The Materiality of White at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2022-2026).
