Mette Maya Gregersen

Geodes have always been a source of mystery and strange beauty for me. When we exhume these capsules, we break their mineral heart, which has been gestating since the dawn of time, we interrupt their deep sleep, and all for our own ephemeral pleasure. What insolence in the face of the earth's mysteries. Mette Maya Gregersen's recent sculptural work creates a mineralogical and organic resonance that strikes me as an attempt to bridge the strange gap between our sensory imagination and the absolute unconsciousness of matter. Maya works with contrasts, or rather handles them as a composer uses sound devices to act on our emotional state. She seems to see the boundaries between "soft" and "hard", "inside" and "outside", "rough" and "smooth" not as barriers, but as thresholds that she crosses with boldness and insight. It's as if her fundamentally ceramic intuition, her material sensitivity, her very fingers were our guides, inviting us to walk the "terrain" of her work, to feel in part her pleasure in working with her hands, her sincerity and her playfulness. In this respect, there is a great sensory generosity in Maya's work, for she understands the process by which we (people) apprehend texture, color, material - the pure "matter" of clay - and create our own associations of mental images. It's a kind of challenge. In this way, the soft, fleshy aspects of his work are complementary to his mineralogical intransigence, the whole creating powerful echoes. In my opinion, the "messages" of art, if you can call them that, should be as simple and as complex as that.
Gareth Mason, March 2019