About
Irja Bodén is a ceramic artist whose sculptures rise as stacked, scarred forms, built from vessels that are cut and reassembled. Working from the language of containment and rupture, she reshapes familiar silhouettes into architectonic structures that hold memory, fracture, and repair. Embossed surfaces and layered glazes gather light and shadow, suggesting sediment, landscape, and the passage of time. Her prints on paper reference the internal and external landscape of the ceramic works.
Artist Statement
My sculptures combine stacked and nested ceramic forms embossed with texture and layered with thick glazes. Each piece begins on the wheel, where I transform raw clay into narrative-based abstract sculptures. The interplay of shape, color, and texture reference the northern landscape along with other realms both physical and metaphysical – from subterranean depths to spiritual domains. The Arctic's vanishing ice sheets, melting glaciers, and thawing permafrost particularly inform my work, translating environmental urgency to tactile form.
Each piece blends place, memory, and loss, drawing from both personal narratives and universal experiences while challenging traditional boundaries between craft and fine art. My technical approach embraces diverse glazing and firing methods—multiple glazes, oxidation, alternative firing methods of smoke firing, and raku—creating complex surfaces that echo geological processes. I began my ceramic series “To Dress a Ptarmigan” in 2018, responding to the systematic destruction and relocation of my hometown in northern Sweden—a city being dismantled due to mining faults beneath its foundations. Situated above the Arctic Circle, the city's name is based on the resilient bird native to this northern region. The series title creates a deliberate parallel: just as dressing a bird for consumption requires careful dismembering and reassembling, so too does the piece-by-piece relocation of an entire city require a meticulous deconstruction of place and identity.
The series cultivates a profound dialogue with the land through several interconnected sub-series; Passage, Aurora, Ferrum, Oracle, Ort and the Earth Shell Series. Each explores facets of environmental fragility and human memory. Works titled "You're In My Heart," "Sorry To See You Go," "Condolences," "Will You Remember Me When You're Gone," and "You Danced for Us, We Dance Back" embody both personal grief and ecological mourning. Through form and surface, these pieces simultaneously acknowledge environmental crisis and honor resilience – ceramic testimonies to landscapes and communities at their breaking point.