My name is Marika Brandt and i am a finnish artist, currently living in Århus, Denmark. I work mainly with sculpture, photography, and pottery. In my sculpting work i use glass and ceramics as my materials.
My artistic career started in 1999 when I studied glassblowing at Häme Polytechnic School in Finland. During those three years I was able to learn the traditional Scandinavian style of glassblowing while working and living in the Nuutajärvi Glass Village.
In 2005 I continued my studies at the Glass and Ceramics school in Bornholm, Denmark. After my studies on Bornholm, I have been able to develop my technical skills by working as a glassblowing assistant and as a glassblower in different studios as well as a teaching assistant in Haystack school of crafts in 2015 and at the European Glass context in 2008.
My interest in photography started when I was doing my internship in USA in 2007. I studied in a local eveningschool in Burlington, VT and learned the basics in the darkroom. I started my studies at Copenhagen film- and photography school in 2010 and got introduced to different genres in the field of photography. Lately I have been focusing on pinhole photography, building my own cameras and to work in the darkroom. From January 2018 until October 2020 I had a collaborative project with an author. In this project; Archiving Silence, we documented our lives for 1001 days with pictures and writing, and it will become a book in a near future.
In 2016 I received a grant from Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Danish Arts Foundation, which enabled me to take part on an intensive 8-week glassblowing course ‘Cane Ladder’ at Penland School of Crafts (NC, USA) with Claire Kelly, and study Italian techniques Pastarelli, Murini, Retticello and more. During my time in Penland I was able to concentrate on my work in glass, but also got a chance to throw ceramics on a potter’s wheel, a technique I fell in love with immediately. I continued to learn Ceramics at a local Danish evening college after returning from the United States, and in the fall of 2017, I had the opportunity to focus on making ceramics in Barcelona, Spain for three months.
I started my master studies in Portugal in 2018, and since then my work has been mainly concentrated on ceramics and especially porcelain. I have studied porcelain properties in my thesis work and created recipes that makes the porcelain more suitable for the potter’s wheel while remaining relatively translucent. I produce my own porcelain and use it for my sculpture work and for my production line Terralicious.
Since 2020 I have had my own ceramics studio: first in Portugal and from summer 2023 in Denmark. I am currently researching porcelain as a material and it is the main material in my artistic work. My artistic work has strong roots in craftsmanship, and the bond created with the material through physical contact is important to me.
Marika S. Brandt 