Pauliina Pöllänen has been selected as the next V&A Ceramic Resident Artist by The Finnish Institute in London and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her residency begins at the beginning of April.

“I am interested in the style and material shifts that span the decades from Art Noveau through Art Deco to early Modernism. The V&A’s collection is a prime place for me to do work because of the access to the physical history of the Arts and Crafts movement. Visually my own practice often consists of organic and geometric forms”, Pöllänen describes her work.

Pauliina Pöllänen was born and raised in Finland, and she received her BA in Ceramic and Glass Design from Kuopio Design Academy in Finland in 2006 and MA degree from the Oslo National Academy of Arts in Norway 2012.

“Pauliina stood out because of her multifaceted practice and her ability to come up with very different projects in different contexts. We look forward to seeing what exciting ideas she comes up with during her residency and how she draws on the V&A’s collections to push her practice in new directions”, says Laura Carderera, who runs the Residency Programme at the V&A

Since 2008, the Residency programme at the V&A allows practitioners special access to the Museum’s collections, resources and curatorial expertise with the aim of inspiring and supporting them in the production of new work. Past residents have gone on to achieve significant success in their professional careers, securing gallery representation and winning awards.

“I would like to create objects that would translate and articulate the objects from the collection differently, possibly to interpret or misinterpret them, and see what kind of dialogue they could have set on a display together as form of a museum intervention,” says Pöllänen. Pöllänen´s work reflects transformation of physical space, interpreted through the medium of clay. Manual production is related to the anthropomorphic qualities of the sculpture and its physical potential. Handbuilt positive and negative spaces reflect the shift from external to internal places, and something invisible, yet concrete, is embedded into these spaces in between.

She has exhibited internationally including the Design Museum in Finland, National Museum of Art, Architecture & Design in Norway, Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, L´atelier d´ateliers d´art de France in Paris and the European Ceramic Context 2014. She has been a resident artist at the The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, SERDE in Aizpute, Latvia and International Ceramic Research Center Guldagergaard in Skælskor, Denmark among other places.