The ceramicist creating uncanny worlds from her fingertips

Ceramicist Nellie Jonsson’s playful works look like discarded props left over from some 1980s film set: realistic enough to leave you feeling a touch of the uncanny, and yet, still prop-like in their silliness. “Within my art, I try to mix in impressions of daily life with this feeling of naivety to it,” the Sweden-born, Norway-based artist says. “It’s a little bit of childishness.”

In our social media-soused reality, instant gratification reigns supreme, but for Jonsson, patience really is a virtue. “It took four days to build the candelabra, then it had to dry out – if it dries out too quickly it might crack,” she explains. Speed can easily be your undoing when it comes to clay work; try to rush the process and you’re left picking up the pieces. “With ceramics, it’s much like developing photos. Take an analogue photo, for instance: you don’t know what it is going to look like until you develop the film. I feel like it’s the same with ceramics, sometimes it’s going to be a surprise.”

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For Jonsson, who grew up in Umeå, northeastern Sweden, being a creative was never in the cards. “I didn’t plan to be an artist,” she says, “I think I was a little bit scared to believe that I could be an artist, until I actually was one.” Though her parents, a teacher and a nurse by trade, were always open for her to follow whatever path she chose, it wasn’t until she moved to Oslo in 2016 – taking up a place at the city’s National Academy of Arts for a bachelors and then a masters degree – that she really began to consider ceramics in any serious capacity. It was tough at the beginning, she says, but through her studies she was given a lot of freedom to explore her creativity and meet other artists in class. At the time, she thought: “I’m just going to take this time and do it now for a few years and then later I will get this ’real career.’” But now, six years on, she’s still at it.

When it comes to creating her whimsical sculptures, Jonsson is very hands-on, building everything by hand using the coiling technique, which involves rolling coils of clay, placing one consecutive coil on the other to craft a form. She doesn’t tend to plan projects, rather preferring for ideas to come to her at random. “I’m an impulsive person – I don’t like to do a lot of sketches and I don’t plan so much,” she says. “I usually start with getting an idea from somewhere, perhaps I’m at a party and I see some interesting interior stuff or someone is telling me a story from their childhood.”

Beloved TV and film moments crop up again and again in her work s; the candelabra, for instance, takes inspiration from Beauty and the Beast’s Lumière. Another standout is the television, which took three months to create from ideation to finish, depicting a scene from cult series Twin Peaks. “The scene shown on the TV is taken from the Black Lodge, when Dale Cooper is dreaming that he is talking to Laura Palmer, who is speaking backwards in riddles,” explains the artist, who was a self-confessed Lynchian fangirl at 18 years old. “It’s a scene that I feel is burned into my brain, so when I first had this idea that I would make a TV, I asked myself: ‘OK, what scene?’ It had to be this.'”