Rock Bone Fire LOTTE GLOB
COVER IMAGE
Silent Rocks ceramic | 32cm (h) x 28cm x 13cm
+44 (0) 1463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk
Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND
LOTTE GLOB
Rock Bone Fire
20 M arch 2026 -18 a pril 2026
Rock : Bone : Fire
We stand in Lotte Glob’s croft looking downhill to Loch Eriboll. To our right is Ben Hope catching a patch of light. Lotte Glob reminds me that she started her ceramic career in Scotland with a hole in the ground. ‘There was no money for a kiln,’ she tells me, I was obsessed with firing earth. Making things from clay begins simply - just clay and fire.’ The hole was one meter deep, and Lotte fired it with wood until the transformation was complete. Out came simple small pots and some last-minute figures. Sixty years have passed since this first firing-in-a-hole and, in the name of artistic exploration, Lotte has built, fired and exploded many kilns in that time.
She has also climbed hills, swam, talked to rocks and left work in her beloved landscape - a rockhopper on Fionaven and floating stones in lochs that few trek to - offerings given back to the land. It is no surprise to find that a band of loyal devotees from all walks of life and countries have discovered Lotte’s work and followed her on this journey.
It is the land of her adopted home, the far northwest of Scotland, that wakes her up every morning, shakes her down, puts light in her eyes and takes her now arthritic hands to the work bench to see what will appear. It wants Lotte to write its storyor the tale of Lotte and the land - for we are all woven together, which is what takes us hereto an exhibition of books and wall pieces in Kilmorack Gallery and this small publication, a celebration of eighty years’ work.
Primeval at Loch Eriboll
18cm (h) x 15cm x 7cm
Much of Lotte Glob’s childhood was spent in rural post-war Denmark, playing in the woods and on the beach where her parents spent much of their time. It was an intoxicating place to be. As well as the natural world, there was inspiration from her father PV Glob’s archaeology which took him on regular trips to Bahrain and Greenland, exploring weird and wonderful ancient ways of living: bog people, rock drawings, rocks and the beliefs felt through living things. Her father was also involved with the most cutting-edge modern art movements in Europe - the COBRA artists - especially Asger Jorn and Erik Nyholm who were close to the Glob household.
‘I remember painting and making sculpture alongside Erik. I was twenty and we would encourage each other to go further.’ Lotte tells me.
It was a limitless world, full of play - and that was the point of the COBRA artists’ work. Play is powerful. Play is political. The act of making things is a defiance, especially in a post-war Europe looking for colour.
Lotte’s grandfather was an artist (who painted the Danish king) and her mother was a gifted pianist but, as Lotte notes, lived in the shadow of her husband. He was a difficult man to
Natural Beach Books
follow, so Lotte made plans to leave Denmark, never stopping playing. By now, in the late 1950s, she had discovered ceramics and was working in the studio of Danish artist Gutte Eriksen (1918 – 2008,) followed by two years at the large eight-generation long Sorring potters work in Denmark. These apprenticeships taught Lotte that, as well as fire and clay, hard labour and focus made the best pots.
We walk downhill towards the Loch, with two dogs, passing stargazers, discovering secret groves and detouring uphill to the broch library and the sky-well. It is easy to forget that Lotte is over eighty.
By 1963 Lotte was in Ireland, then Morar on the west of Scotland, and back to Denmark for her first solo (and sellout) exhibition. By 1967 she had moved to Durness and freedom, becoming one of the first residents of the Balnakeil ex-MOT base which offered peppercorn rents for those brave enough to bring electricity and plumbing to the windowless concrete buildings - in a raggle-tag community of artists and crafts people. This was her first commercial studio - Far North Ceramics - a home, a new family and, more importantly, a laboratory-like studio where, for the next thirty years, as well as mugs, plates and pots, outpoured work that expressed another side of her.
I first met Lotte when Kilmorack Gallery was new, in 1997, which was just after she released three-hundred-and-thirty-three ‘floating stones’ back into the sea, and around her studio were sitting stones, fountains and a large book with skulls fired into it which creaked when its tarred pages were turned. It was a place where creative magma erupted.
There was a move ten miles from Durness to the current ‘sculpture croft’ in 2000: then a bare hillside sloping to Loch Eribol; and now a maze of trees, sculptures, studios and her home on poles which floats above the land. We walk back up the slope, past the blueberries and into her studio.
‘Why books?’, I ask.
‘Books have always been important to me. They hold secrets.
They are beautiful. And you can go into the mountains and find a rockface that looks like a whole library of books - pages of rock fired together eons ago. It is like the rocks are telling me something about the past. My books tell something too. They are a diary, a way of remembering my wanderings. There are no shortcuts in making my books. It can’t be an impression of a book. It must be the real thing, with pages, age and secrets and like all ceramics, it is nothing until it has been through the fire.’
‘Through the fire?’
‘Ha! Yes. I have put everything ‘through the fire.’ Sometimes it can explode but you can put a whole bolder through the fire if you are crazy enough. I still have the first one that worked, but I’ll try anything, rock, sediment, bone, earth, glass and metal. It is a way of using what is around me; raw and unrefined, from the land. ‘
We walk back up the hill to Lotte’s studio where two years of secrets that have been ‘through the fire’ are spread and awaiting preparation for this exhibition, Rock – Bone - Fire. It’s an incredible body of work. There are wall pieces, individual pages, that contain bones and rocks gathered from Lotte’s walks –fossilised moments and fossilised lives. And there are so many books, not a library. It’s more personal than that. They are a vast collection of stone notebooks. I look at the titles and see the stories and moments caught: Leaning Against a Hot Boulder,Voices from the Past, Meeting Deep Time, Aimless Wandering, Below the Horizon,The Place of Certainty, Fallen Stars in the Loch, the Book of Calm and Chaos.
I look at Lotte and we smile knowing that she just can’t stop. ‘Tony, I can’t help it. Life is an experiment.’
Tony Davidson Kilmorack Gallery
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Danish born ceramic artist Lotte Glob (b 1944) lives and works on her Sculpture Croft by Loch Eribol, surrounded by the rugged Northwest Highlands. On long hikes into the mountains Glob gathers rocks and sediments which she combines with different clays, sculpting and firing them in a process ‘similar to the landscape’s volcanic origins.’
‘To Lotte Glob the landscape is a living thing full of magic and reinvention. It is a place where a boulder may get up and walk off on stout sturdy legs. It is also a place of song and star-gazers. Glob takes inspiration and materials from here, and often offers them back as gifts to nature. The inspiration of her father (well-known archaeologist Peter Glob) is there too: the ancient peaty Tollund Man and the CoBrA artists.’
Tony Davidson, Director of Kilmorack Gallery
Exhibiting internationally since 1965, Lotte Glob moved to the North West Highlands in 1968. Her work is represented in public collections including the Museum of Fine Art, Copenhagen, The National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. Dundee Art Gallery Museum, Maclaurin Gallery, Ayr, Victoria & Albert Library Collection, Paisley Museum & Gallery of Art Collections, Stirling University and private collections worldwide.
+44 (0) 1463 783 230 art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk
Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND
