One Bachelor Exhibition with Twelve Students at Five Different Locations in Two Thousand Twenty Five and Twenty Six
Thanks to: Augustinus Fonden, Otto Bruuns Fond, Sparekassen Bornholms Fond, Bornholms Brandforsikring, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond, Den Hielmstierne-Rosencroneske Stiftelse
27.06–26.08.2025
05.09–09.11.2025
05.09–22.11.2025
29.11–10.01.2026
13.01–06.02.2026
Bornholms Center for Kunsthåndværk, Hasle
CLAY Keramikmuseum Danmark, Middelfart
Glas – Museum for Glaskunst, Ebeltoft
Form / Design Center, Malmö
Royal Danish Academy, Library, Copenhagen
Charlotte Jul Agata Kutniowska Anna Lova Sauk
Anna Mors
Anne Søgaard
Frandsen
Denis Botlo
Dimitri Sarazin
Johan Urrutia
Julie Fuhlendorff
Maja Ahnlund Sally Olika Morks
Magdalena Köb
Maider Egiluz
Intro Patchwork of futures
The Royal Danish Academy on Bornholm comes across as a large house with a garden more than a formal educational institution. Luckily, it is both. The education in glass and ceramics on this rocky island in the Baltic Sea is a special place. Here, hopeful creatives from all over the world meet to pursue an education in two of history’s most common natural materials: glass and clay. The melting pot of cultures, languages and anecdotes from two dozen creatives every year makes a difference, and the multinational perspective keeps minds open and spurs tolerance.
On Bornholm, the school radiates a familiar atmosphere – maybe because it is situated on an island far from the buzzing capital of Copenhagen, where the primary part of the Royal Danish Academy is located. The island’s remoteness makes the school a satellite in the best sense. Here, the Department of Crafts in glass and ceramics is a world rich in community, hospitality and generosity. Here, the students spend three and a half years focusing on working, learning, and experimenting, combined with two internships in their 4th and 7th semesters. Here, the students slowly but surely refine their competencies and knowledge with the material while helping each other – in life and work.
The majority of students acknowledge that time on the island is bliss. Still, it is hard work and requires discipline and dedication to intent to master the material. Getting to know its strengths and its flaws. Getting a grip on techniques, the ever-evolving journey of your aesthetic language and the content you want to express through it. But Oh My, am I hopeful? This year’s bachelor students have a pluralistic take on tradition, material, and expressions, and my heart sings at the many pensive thoughts they muster alongside.
They are clever, reflective, humble, joyful, traditionalists, innovators, eclectic and sensitive. They have energetic and high hopes for the future, in which we’ll find objects from their mindful hands made from repurposed and recycled clay as markers of time. We’ll discover functional objects with strong references to the industrial era – maybe as a comment on how to do it better? (why otherwise make industrial references in hand-built items?) We see inspiration from contemporary culture, such as video games, comics, science fiction, and photography, which we can interpret as open-ended stories that we can freely appropriate. We find vessels that invite us to investigate the potential and ubiquitous power in the soft and the vulnerable – supposing we dare to pursue it. We meet cross-disciplinary mash-ups of cultures, symbols, and global sources of inspiration. We notice archetypical vessels and figurines that yield new references because the context is different and, therefore, adds and substracts new layers of meaning.
I see deeply engaged makers who install and integrate experiences of grief, personal challenges, and climate awareness into their projects. These curious bachelor students are potential bearers of meaning in a world where sense and purpose seem outdated and challenging. They don’t seem to care or mind going against the grain. Maybe because when you are young, you genuinely believe that the world can change, and you can contribute to a new way of sense-making. I sincerely hope so. The world needs young energy and new interpretations of the status quo. People say that we can’t imagine the future looking different than the one we are in. Our imagination is limited – our outsight is obscured by pre-determined notions, prejudice, and other ‘roadblocks’. That is both sad and a possibility. I root for exploring the potential of using materials and each other to push the boundaries of imagination and find new places to grow and evolve.
As a craftsperson, you live and work through your material. You are a ‘crafting being’ that shapes your intentions in a reciprocal, sensual, and existential interaction between content and material. From this, you narrate and navigate the world as a clever, dynamic, and fluid practitioner of a craft rooted in thousands of years of tradition and history with the potential to emerge and elaborate in new, beautiful, and fruitful ways. The 2025 bachelor students communicate authenticity and genuine intentions, which makes me hopeful for the patchwork of futures and the artistic field of crafts in glass and ceramics.
Congratulations!
Agata Kutniowska
Everywhere I go, I take my camera with me. I believe that there is beauty to be seized all around us, it might just require that we stand in a specific angle at a specific moment, or that the sun shines through the leaves of a tree in the exact way it does in the exact moment you cast a glance at it. I capture different urban compositions made by people and nature.
I look for details, collect and translate them into design objects, like functional vases or abstract sculptures.
The forms I make center around geometric shapes and clean lines run parallel throughout my work. I believe that the balance of angles and geometry lay the primal foundation of my aesthetics. Adding the imperfect human touch and infusing my experiences as surface details I archive my interests into a universally comprehensive object. Simplicity might be the most complex way of telling a personal story.
Ceramics, once fired, are permanent. This is what inspires me to make, and learn as much as possible while doing it. To be able to crystallize the way I see things into the material and constantly develop new ways of seeing, which are inherently timeless.
Anna Lova Sauk II.
The language of nature, storytelling, history, mythology, and movement are themes that become part of the framework within my process, alongside an ongoing exploration of the concept of duality and the relationship between contrasts. Losing control, having control, letting go of control. Finding stillness in movement, movement in stillness, beauty in the unpleasant, the beautiful and the grotesque, resistance within the fragile, and softness in the rugged. A strive to find both balance and friction in the obverse.
For me, working with clay is a playful process. It is a conversation in constant movement, and a metamorphosis that includes tradition and innovation in one. Where the material is an extension of the bodily and a tool that helps to tell stories that go beyond the spoken words.
A kind of dance that transcends from my own tactility into an external vessel where the physical experience, emotion, or story is captured.
Anna Lova Sauk
Anna Lova Sauk
Anna Mors III.
I make ceramic objects rooted in function that connect ancient craft with contemporary life. My work often draws on classical forms like amphoras and archaeological vessels that were once part of daily routines. Placing these forms in modern contexts invites reflection on their relevance – not just as artifacts, but as living objects.
Through reinterpretation, I aim to bring them back into our shared spaces – not to restore their original function, but to acknowledge their form, presence, and the way they shape how we perceive and relate to the world.
I’m drawn to ceramic processes in all their variations. Each technique carries its own knowledge, and I find it essential to understand the material from many angles. I throw and hand-build based on instinct, shaping ideas before they slip away.
In my bachelor project, I explore the relationship between vessels and their podiums, examining how this interaction can transform our experience of both.
Anne Søgaard Frandsen
My ceramic practice is rooted in a desire to create a space where grief, spiritual longing, and unfamiliar emotions can be held and processed. Drawing from my inner landscape and matter of nature, I give form to the intangible layers of emotional and spiritual experience, awakening them through tactile ceramic sculptures.
Through personal encounters with loss and my work as a hospice nurse, I have experienced how grief often creates an abstract and intangible space, marked by an absence of time, words, and meaning. A space that can be difficult to enter –and if we don’t, it may form an almost impermeable wall between us.
I explore the boundary between inner and outer worlds through the encounter of clay and a membrane-like biofilm, cultivated via the fermentation of bacteria and yeast. I investigate how the biofilm’s changing translucency, thickness, color, and softness interact with different high-fired clay bodies, whose movements shift between reaching outward towards the world and folding inward towards the self. I see it as much more than a defined boundary: a collective, permeable matter that can connect us, touch us, and bring us into dialogue with the world. How does this encounter shape our experience of the boundary between inside and outside?
Anne Søgaard Frandsen
Denis Botlo
My artistic work combines several disciplines and interests such as design, sculpture, public space, graphics and the theatre scene. With my projects, I try to capture a moment that is specific, empty and naive, giving people a chance to be creative, a chance to add their own story to the scene I create and to the objects they are familiar with.
My big inspiration is contemporary culture, the way people live today in a world that is changing every day. Ceramics, allows me to immobilize and fossilize these moments in a quick world, and with them record my handwriting, my movement and my view. The very organic, plastic material becomes a static immobilized object after firing, with my fingerprint and the perspective I see.
Dimitri Sarazin
In a constant search for a possibility to translate my ideas into tangible objects, I found in glass a catalyst for my creative process. The material resonates with a need for me to quickly translate ideas from a thought, to a physical item. The more I utilize glass as a sketching method, the more the material allows me to have an intense and rapidly productive workflow.
While exploring traditional techniques, I attempt to construct a contemporary visual language that resonates with my aesthetic sensibility. Through my personal experiences, I have accumulated an array of influences that I synthesise in my pieces. From middle eastern visual arts and music, to the New York contemporary glass scene, I have been shaped by my surroundings. This rich multicultural education has allowed me to keep an open mind in my practice as an artist.
If I now focus on glass as a creative tool, I continuously have recourse to photography, drawing, painting, cinema and sound in my work. Both in the way I communicate it or more directly, as inherent parts of the bodies of work. A pluridisciplinary artist at heart, my process pushes me to experiment with as many mediums as I can get a hold of.
My work is a representation of myself: an ever evolving patchwork of influence that converse through my visual explorations.
Dimitri Sarazin
Johan Urrutia
I see ceramics as a parallel to human activity and history throughout the last 20,000 years. The maker has their unique and ever changing say in the process, and the material has and always will have its own. It’s a collaboration.
What fascinates me is the idea of creating something truly physical with my hands. Every detail being under my control. Every decision, every break I take where a piece dries, even for minutes, is part of the decision-making process that leads to a finished object. It’s ultimately about trusting the process and most importantly about trusting my instincts. Having a strong visual mind and growing up constantly drawing has shaped me into seeing the invisible potential in two intersecting lines or a layer of two stoneware coils, which excites me immensely.
Worldbuilding is my creative turn on. Drawing most of my inspiration from video games, films, and things I genuinely enjoy, whether “cool” or not. The task of combining separate worlds into one cohesive entity is a challenge which will never tire me. I am proud to call myself a ceramicist, and it is an honour to carry on the dialogue between the curious maker and the yielding material.
Julie Fuhlendorff
I see glassblowing not just as a process, but as a language – one that allows me to speak through form, weight, and light. My work is rooted in design: in function, in purpose, and in quiet presence. It merges functional and sculptural glass pieces.
I work primarily with clear glass – drawn to its honesty, its solidity, and the way it captures and transforms light. Each object begins with an idea, but it is shaped equally by intuition and precision. My pieces are not meant to be explained; they are meant to be lived with.
I draw inspiration from the world of fashion and contemporary design – from proportion, silhouette, and material clarity. My practice is a meeting point between traditional craftsmanship and a modern, refined aesthetic. In the end, my work is not just about what’s created, but how it makes you feel in the spaces it occupies.
For my bachelor project, I’m finding inspiration in the past – exploring the aesthetics of the late 20th-century glass. I’m drawn to its bulkiness, its heaviness, its presence. I create forms that are heavy with intention but soft in their expression. My work is about holding space for tradition while translating it into a contemporary language.
Julie Fuhlendorff
Julie Fuhlendorff
Magdalena Köb
In a world that moves fast, the act of making becomes a grounding ritual to me.
Molten glass transforms into solid; motion becomes shape. Through symbolism, construction, and deconstruction, I create objects that hold traces which echo from the past, reach into the now, and suggest a future not yet lived.
My work navigates the thresholds between the physical and the intangible, drawing on occult influences, lived experiences and science fiction aesthetics.
It invites for quiet questions and moments of reflection, offering a space to wonder. This gentle curiosity guides my work, turning questions into form and fleeting moments into lasting objects.
Maider Egiluz
I work with clay, ceramic shards, and everyday objects gathered from places I visit again and again – abandoned quarries, former factory sites, and domestic edges where geology, craft, and erosion meet. I choose fragments that register time: the marks of industrial labour, the slow abrasion of weather, the traces of daily use. Selecting is an act of care for me; each piece is kept for the questions it holds rather than the answers it could supply.
My process starts with walking and observing, letting the site decide what enters the studio and what remains in place. There, I test relationships: some pieces are fired to merge their histories, while others stay untouched so their surfaces can speak. I build open arrangements that sit between sculpture, archive, and field note, resisting closure and inviting the viewer to complete the reading. By relocating these materials to the exhibition space, I present them as channels for curiosity and reflection, pointing to our own interventions and the changes we inscribe, as humans, upon the natural landscape.
Maja Ahnlund
I believe everyday ceramic objects are made to be treasured. To nourish with memories and important moments. For me, that is the true beauty in these objects. They may be quiet but can contain more than a function – they hold our stories. Stories from life, from creating the pots on the wheel, to that one time it dropped to the floor and a small shard came out. How life is implemented into these objects is where I as a maker come alive.
For me, the material leads as much as it responds, creating a dynamic relationship that I embrace throughout my process – especially in the act of throwing, where every movement is a memory in the form. With deep roots in the traditions and history of craft, I approach my work using old traditions such as woodfiring, where I am present with the material.
My creativity is nourished by the material itself – the way it moves, resists, and transforms – as well as by the elements that influence the atmosphere. The aspect of unpredictability, where flame, ash, and heat leave their marks, making each piece unique. I find inspiration in that tension between tradition and innovation, between what is controlled and what is left to chance. Each piece is not just an object but a record of this ongoing exploration.
Maja Ahnlund
Sally Olika Morks
I imagine a world with more tenderness and curiosity. Through the holes in my vessel, I want to invite you into an intimate space, that is often easier to hide, than to show and be proud of. In a time that calls for us to be strong, I urge, that we search for the strength in a place of softness, curiosity and joy. That we see the vulnerable as a place of power, because vulnerability is not weakness. It means, that behind the doubts and fear, there is something precious to cultivate and protect.
The relation between opposites – inside and outside, intention and incident, positive and negative space, strength and fragility, alien and familiar, is an ongoing exploration in my work. While these are often seen as contradictions, I see them as interdependent, each defining and deepening the other. This duality is present both in the concepts I explore and the techniques I use. In the act of making, I find myself moving in and out of control. I shape the clay with intention, guiding its form and surface. When I use my materials experimentally, I have to let go of control to embrace the unpredictable.
Sally Olika Morks
One Bachelor Exhibition with Twelve Students at Five Different Locations in Two Thousand Twenty Five and Twenty Six
Thanks to: Augustinus Fonden, Otto Bruuns Fond, Sparekassen Bornholms Fond, Bornholms Brandforsikring, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond, Den Hielmstierne-Rosencroneske Stiftelse
