“People’s exteriors often present a more simple person, opposing what’s really going on on the inside. That’s why questions and curiosity are so important to connect with people, to understand them.”

I realised I had fallen into the same reflex of projection, only from the opposite direction. When I first saw Gitte Jungersen’s work, I imagined the artist behind it to mirror its abrasiveness and intensity, perhaps even its unpredictability. From the outside at least, she is the exact opposite to the volatile and unruly forms she has created.

When Gitte Jungersen opened the door to her studio - which she refers to as her “cave” - in September 2021 - she first appeared cautious, almost shy, speaking in such a soft, measured tone, that I remember modulating my own voice, mirroring her, as if not to disrupt the required atmosphere. As she walked me through her basement level studio, located in Østerbro, Copenhagen, she spoke about the importance of “hiding” and “finding solitude” in order to work. I suspected at this moment that studio visits were something she rarely welcomed. As I looked between her and the work, I felt an impatience to understand the impulse behind it, how these eruptions on the shelves could coexist with the composed presence beside me.

Gitte Jungersen is tall and slight, with fine skin, delicate bone structure, and a cropped blonde bob. The restraint in her presence feels like its own form of intensity. “Of course everything I do is projections of me, you know.” Gitte talks about being seen as “pretty” when she was younger, and that it was almost like “being in a prison of expectation” as if she was beholden to the ideals around this external facade, a surface others read simply as “sweet” before she ever had the chance to speak. “Being gentle, and polite, and blah, blah, blah” she says, felt like another role she needed to uphold, one she wanted to shake off like a dog.

“Everyone takes one look at me and expects I will make something thin, airy, white, feminine… possibly because I’m skinny and tall and… well, you’re not the first person to say you’re surprised when you look at me and then my work.” I could sense Gitte was a little tired of this opinion and alleged "separateness" between her and her art.

Gitte Jungersen was born in 1967 in Århus, Denmark and studied at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen from 1988 - 1993, then called the Danish School of Design. Originally looking to study architecture, she eventually landed on ceramics. Yet Gitte’s earliest exposure to artistic expression began in the wings of the Århus Theatre where her father worked on set construction. “I wanted to be an actor” she thought at the age of 12. “I remember I used to stand there with my father in the wings, night after night, watching the same stage show, time and time again. It was fascinating to me.” It awakened something in Gitte that she had spent much of her childhood trying to suppress.

“I thought I always had ‘weird’ ideas within me. Constantly feeling like the odd one. My imagination didn’t seem to fit into the world I was brought up in.”

“When I entered adolescence, I was worried, thinking, ‘This is going to be boring.’” She feared that the sense of possibility she’d carried as a child would be flattened into the kind of adult life she saw around her, one measured in earning, consuming, and keeping up. “Buying things and accumulating financial wealth,” she said. “A bigger house. A nicer car. A television larger than the neighbour’s” she continues. The thought of that future felt suffocating to her, and I could still hear a trace of it in her voice. “It was very frustrating as a child, watching that life around me and believing those ways were fixed, laid out long before I had the chance to even question them.”

The Århus Theatre felt like a creative salvation. It confirmed that this “oddness” she felt had somewhere to go. She saw here for the first time that there were people who worked out of curiosity. People who chose meaning instead of merely earning. It was revelatory to her that fun and expression didn’t have to take place after-hours, they could actually be the work. “In my mind, here at the Århus Theatre I saw people that had a purpose to get up in the morning.” 

Years later, ceramics appeared almost by accident. She stepped into the design school with a friend and felt again the energy she’d first known in the theatre. She followed it then, and still does, toward what feels alive, and willing to break open.

“Gitte Jungersen belongs to a generation of ceramicists who have done a great deal to change people’s conceptions about what ceramics can be,” said art historian Jorunn Veiteberg. “At the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in 1995, she showed a number of cubic vessels, but it was not the form or function that invited the observer to reflect on, but the glaze: vicious and full of porous air bubbles.”

“I’m interested in the raw, stripped-back, demanding side of people and nature, the parts that no longer pretend, or hold themselves together,” she says. “In the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi, beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness, and I believe that deeply. Ugliness in my work attracts me because it resists what people expect or desire.”

It brought to mind a line from the book Art as Therapy, where Alain de Botton and John Armstrong describe our “longing to become a polished and elegant version of ourselves,” and how “we hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities.” Gitte’s work denies that comfort. They argue that we call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we feel we’re missing, and ugly when it reflects moods we find threatening or already overwhelming.

Ugliness, chaos, and catastrophe are words that Gitte often uses to describe her work, not as drama, but as method. The moment clay meets her hands, a kind of fate begins, yet never without boundaries. What looks volatile is in fact held together by a strict architecture. As Gitte puts it, “You can’t rupture what’s already ruptured. For the disruption to register, to be held, you need order first - stillness, clarity, an internal scaffolding. Without that structure to resist it, the break can’t perform."

This restrained and deliberate framework is necessary so she can push it to the edge without it turning into a formless mass. The greater the upheaval she invites, the firmer the scaffolding beneath it. Her work lives in that tension, between control and chaos, geometry and dissolution, intention and everything that lives outside it. From there, the kiln introduces its own forces, and at that point she must finally surrender, and let go.

She sometimes calls this approach a “controlled rebellion,” not against ceramics itself, but against the expectations placed on it, refinement, symmetry, and usefulness. Her rebellion is material, not rhetorical. Glazes that behave like geological forces, bubbling, cracking, expanding, demanding the clay structure to withstand this momentary catastrophe.

“I want to expand the boundaries of when something is considered successful... You make something, you fire it, and the result is judged. I want to undo that.”

She recalls a piece she once believed she had “overfired” - a surface she initially read as too much, too melted, too collapsed. “And now it has become the darling,” she said, smiling. “You don’t know sometimes what’s struck the right note until you see the whole series. What was once ‘too much’ becomes the thing that leads the work forward.”

Failure, or the appearance of it, is where her attention sharpens.  “When people think it’s a mistake, that’s usually when I like it the most,” she told me. What matters to her is making space for uncertainty to simply exist. “I see it as the most interesting thing.”

During her time at the Royal Danish Academy, Gitte studied under the artist Kirsten Christensen, whom she describes as “extremely important to me” during her studies. Their dynamic, she says, was “a strange mother-daughter relationship,” and Christensen became a kind of “artistic mother” to her. “She liked me best when my work was the ugliest, the loudest, the most non-pleasing,” Gitte recalls. It stood in sharp contrast to the ethos of the school then, shaped by Scandinavian design values, controlled, moralistic, democratic.

Christensen, by contrast, valued candour and rupture. “She was very honest, also in her own work,” Gitte says. Christensen’s work from the 1970s was featured in the 2021 exhibition “After the Silence – Women of Art Speak Out” at the Statens Museum, a moment that sparked renewed interest in her work. Gitte laughs and shakes her head as she recounts a review from that time: “The critic wrote, ‘I didn’t know this artist, but wow.’ Kirsten’s work has always been incredible, and it’s a shame people are only paying attention now.” Christensen did receive brief attention in the 1970s, but social realism then tended to frame women artists through narratives of hardship - poverty, illness, sacrifice - and her work didn’t fit that mould. Only now, in an era more willing to revisit overlooked women artists has Christensen’s perspective begun to receive the attention it always deserved.

“I often experience that my audience doesn’t follow me at first,” Gitte adds. “But after some years, some return and come along.”

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Gitte describes her own approach as returning to “Ground 0” for form, paring things back to the most basic elements. “My working process is close to how scientists work, in the sense that I try to get rid of all ideas of how it should turn out. I try to break down all preconceived notions of how I want it to look. Of course it doesn’t always work out like this, but I try to stay open. That’s the objective: not to attach yourself to a desired result, but to analyse the steps and processes that enabled the result as it is.”

She tells me this while touching again on how easily an exterior - a face, a voice, a presence - invites assumptions. “No one would ever expect me to go ‘RAAGGHHHH,’” she bursts out, her voice suddenly louder, dropping into a deeper register as she flings both arms above her head, fingers splayed, making herself larger in an instant. She starts laughing and she sinks back down, elbows tucked in, smaller than before, a brief, and delightful glimpse of the rawness that lives within.

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“As women, you’re expected to be less aggressive, or less ugly in our opinions, attitudes, art - less intellectual, less… blah blah than the men.”

I ask how this plays out at home, married to a professor. It seems, I suggest, an ideal dynamic for unfiltered debate and intellectual sparring. Gitte smiles. “Yes, but I am much louder and much more intellectual than he is,” she laughs, clearly repeating a well-worn joke between them. “He always says, ‘I’m the dumb one, so you have to be the clever one.’”

Gitte has been with her husband for 34 years. They trained together at the Royal Danish Academy, where he was originally a lecturer. “It hasn’t been a problem with my husband,” Gitte insists, when I enquire about the freedom needed to be an artist. “We have such a symbiosis. Growing up together from such a young age, doing the same thing, we share so much. That’s a huge part of our marriage. We understand each other and deeply respect each other.” Being in the same field gave their relationship a built-in understanding.

“He always backs me up, the same way Kirsten did. Never try to fit in. He’s been generous my whole life - especially in those early years when stability mattered - but he has never asked me to make ‘nice’ things to make more money. Because he was trained as an artist, he understands why that matters. Some artists with partners in ‘normal jobs’ can face pressure to compromise, but I’ve had the luck of being with someone I never have to explain myself to - it’s simply not up for discussion.”

In raising their children, the idea of ‘not having to fit in, not having to please’ is something they instilled in them early on. Their children are now in their twenties. “To be honest,” she says, “as an artist I found it incredibly frustrating to become a mother, and at the same time, the best thing in the world. It didn’t take away my freedom, but it did take away my hours.” Given how time-intensive her work is, this meant a radical shift. “Those were very frustrating years.”

“I was not a very good mother when I brought them here.” She laughs as she says this, knowing it resists the romantic image of the artist mother. “The children always wanted to look at the clay, to play with the clay, but I found excuses,” she says with a smile. “It was too distracting.”

“What I’m proud to have passed on to them is an appreciation for ‘otherness’ - the ability to value what others might see as odd, ugly, difficult, or strange. They recognise that in my work and respect it. They’ve inherited an artistic set of values from both their father and me, and in many ways those values feel more essential than being taught how to make ceramics by your mother.”

What her children have always seen is that Gitte does not behave like other mothers. “You don’t care what people think,” her daughter once said, and she likes that. “I think I’ve made it easier for them,” she adds, “opened something rather than closed it.”

Having been based in Denmark her whole life, I ask whether she imagines living elsewhere, she shakes her head. “My inspiration is around long historical lines and life’s big questions, less what is happening on the streets. I don’t think I would do anything different in another place… I’m not very influenced by my surroundings.”

And when I ask if she is satisfied with her body of work at age fifty-eight, she doesn’t pause. “Not at all. I haven’t finished yet. I haven’t found it yet. I hope it doesn’t stop. I don’t want it to stop. I can’t imagine my life without it. There will always be the next question and the next corner.”

It occurs to me that the truest constant in her practice is a refusal to reach resolve. Gitte Jungersen’s work is unsettling because it pushes against the fiction of perfection - the myth that we will eventually “arrive,” and become whole. In a world where we’re encouraged to hide our messy and difficult sides, Gitte’s work confronts the raw interior places that never tidy themselves, the parts we spend our lives trying not to face - including the quiet truth that we are not as strong, or as nice, or as complete as we pretend to be.