There are incredibly talented Kalaallit artists working both in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and abroad. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh, Nuuna Papis Chemnitz and Lisbeth Karline Poulsen about their use of ceramics in their diverse art practices. In this Portfolio, we take a look at the artists’ work with clay and how they are able to create pieces that highlight cultural pride and visibility of their homeland.
Clay is easy enough to play with but more difficult to master. The medium demands a commitment of time and investment in tools, materials and equipment. Knowledgeable ceramic artists and technicians need an understanding of chemistry for mixing clay and glazes to predict their interactions. Patience is key as well: test firings, long dry times, trials and errors. But seeing an object take shape through the medium is incredibly rewarding. From mugs to sculptures, vases, busts and large-scale art installations, the versatility of clay as a material and the imaginative directions artists can take it is wonderful and impressive.
Working with clay can easily become a lifelong passion. I had my first experience working with clay in Ottawa, ON, in 2018 when I enrolled in a wheel-throwing class at a local studio. I made mugs and bowls over many years. I eventually learned hand-building, the method of forming clay with your hands and using a slab roller, and gave up the wheel. I have since moved to a private shared studio at a non-profit organization called Studio Space Ottawa, where I coil and slab-build bigger vessels and sculptures and still dabble in the odd mug or two. I was lucky to find space to work, friends to learn from and a kiln to fire in. While conversing with Kalaallit artists, I was impressed by the access to workspace and kilns that the Association of Artists in Greenland, KIMIK, offers in Nuuk, and the art education opportunities in Kalaallit Nunaat that no doubt have been conducive to producing and sustaining a wonderfully diverse landscape of artists.
Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh
Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh is a multidisciplinary artist who has been the head of the Greenland Art School in Nuuk since 2021. She works in graphic art, digital collage, painting and ceramics, to name a few. She carries her graphic style into her ceramic sculptures to create whimsical, metamorphosing human-like creatures. Her ceramic works have a wonderful grotesque beauty, reminiscent of tupilaat, the Kalaallit shamanic figures used to seek revenge against one’s enemies.
Høegh’s sculptures have a great historical Inuit art aesthetic while being contemporary at the same time. I love the timeless yet fresh feel of her work. Her sculptures highlight the natural beauty of animals in the Arctic landscape and feature depictions of transformation, which are important themes in Inuit art. Høegh expands on these ideas by giving her Arctic creatures turtles’ backs, zebra stripes or cheetah spots, incorporating more of Earth’s creatures into the Inuit world.
Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh Qarsaaq isumassarsiorfigalu (Red-throated loon) (2024) © THE ARTIST
Høegh told me about the art opportunities available in Kalaallit Nunaat to aspiring artists. After graduating from the Aarhus Art Academy (Århus Kunstakademi) in Denmark, Høegh moved back to Nuuk and became a member of KIMIK, where artists have access to studio space and the use of three kilns. Her workdays consist of mornings spent as the head of the Greenland Art School and afternoons making art and creating whatever she feels.
Many of Høegh’s ceramic pieces are left unglazed, allowing the natural beauty of the clay and its grainy texture to draw in viewers. Glaze is a mixture of materials that, when fired, creates a shiny or matte surface that is essentially glass. For functional ware, glaze can add utility and washability, but it can also be used simply for aesthetics and creative play.
A three-headed, two-ended loon mammal is decorated with real bird feathers, reminding us that Høegh is a collage artist in any medium she chooses. I love that clay can be an artistic sculpture or a multi-dimensional canvas to decorate. On another piece, a hand-built bowl, Høegh has hand-painted her signature animal images with underglaze or coloured clay. These graphic images appear in other aspects of her 2D art practice as linocuts or collage.
Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh Untitled (Ceramic bust of Ole Kristiansen) (2024) © THE ARTIST
The 2024 ceramic bust of Ole Kristiansen, a renowned Kalaallit singer and songwriter, is Høegh’s favourite ceramic creation. She noted that “working on this piece was special because of Kristiansen’s impact on Greenlandic culture. He is one of the best singer-songwriters of his generation . . . his texts are so special.” [1] Høegh used a European construction style to create the artwork. With this technique, a slab of clay is carved in the person’s likeness on the outside, left to dry to the leather-hard state (when raw clay has air dried but can still be manipulated) and then the supporting clay on the inside of the bust is scooped out.
Through collage, Høegh has the ability to bring many worlds together in her artwork—music and art, new and old, local animals and those from afar, all with stunning effects.
Nuuna Papis Chemnitz
Nuuna Papis Chemnitz creates functional and decorative ceramic pieces under the name Ulaajuk Pottery, which means “the well-shaped one” in Kalaallisut, a fitting name for stunning pieces made and decorated with care. She sometimes uses local materials and precious gemstones to adorn her functional ware and hand-built sculptures. Chemnitz’s work is inspired by the beauty of her surroundings and her culture. It features earthy tones, icy glazes, dashes of blush pink, butter yellow and sage green, as well as symmetrical dots reminiscent of tunniit and avittat, traditional sealskin needlework. She described a deep respect for Inuit design and tattooing traditions, “They are so beautiful and tell stories about ourselves. I don’t have any tattoos myself and decided that my tattoo would be on a cup.” [2] This illustrates to me that artworks are an extension of us as artists.
Nuuna Papis Chemnitz Black stoneware cup with a tunniit-inspired pattern and glazed with a combination of Kalaallit clay and homemade glaze, 2024 © THE ARTIST
Enter a potter’s studio and you’ll see an overwhelming number of projects at various stages, but Chemnitz’s work tells a story of calm. Clean lines and soft curves allow the natural materials to take centre stage. Chemnitz draws attention to the beautiful texture and colour in her materials by first making a symmetrical, technically sound object. It takes years of experience to succeed consistently on the pottery wheel, and it’s evident that Chemnitz has mastered it. Throwing on the wheel, terminology used to describe creating something on the pottery wheel, entails many steps: wedging clay (similar to kneading bread dough) to remove air bubbles, centring the clay on the wheel so it becomes symmetrical as it’s worked, throwing the shape you’d like and trimming the bottom after it dries to a leather-hard state. Each step takes a lot of practice and learning how to fix the various problems that can arise.
Chemnitz began her ceramic art journey in 2017 when she enrolled in an evening class offered by the municipality, where she fell “in love from the first time I touched clay.” She enrolled in a second class after that and then practiced on her own, improving her skills on the wheel by watching videos on YouTube and throwing over and over again. During the pandemic, she bought a pottery wheel and then a small kiln for her space in her home. She quickly outgrew her home space and moved into an atelier (workshop). She eventually purchased a larger kiln and quickly realized that the final thing she needed was more time. Months after moving into the atelier, she left her job at Air Greenland to focus on ceramics full-time.
Nuuna Papis Chemnitz Porcelain vase and bowl glazed on the outside with wild Kalaallit clay and glacier flour from the Nuuk fjord, 2022 © THE ARTIST
An important part of Chemnitz’s practice is experimenting with local ingredients, such as clay and sand, for surface decoration—the addition of ornamentation to the outer surface of a pot—which works well for her as the process of collecting and testing wild clay and using it as a base is costly, time-intensive and limited by season. She also decided to try adding raw rubies—given to her by her brother —to her stoneware and porcelain. “Testing and trying is a big part of working with ceramics: some tests are good, some not so good,” she says.
Chemnitz has clearly put the time into finding out what techniques are successful; her stunning pieces evoke memories of Kalaallit Nunaat’s stark landscapes.
Lisbeth Karline Poulsen
Multidisciplinary artist Lisbeth Karline Poulsen was raised in Denmark and is now based in Nuuk. She works in many mediums such as textiles, ceramics, sculpture, graphic art, videography and film production. She attended the Greenland Art School in Nuuk and later studied art at the Aarhus Art Academy.
During our conversation, we spoke about her largest ceramic work, Nakkutilliisut (The Guardians) (2024), which depicts Nuliajuk. She says of the piece, “I wanted to create a sense of calm, trust and security. Early on in the process, I asked the spirits if it was okay to illustrate them and told them I would only do it in honour.” [3] The large artwork is displayed on the outer façade of the Ilulissat Police Station. Poulsen created it in response to a call for public art from the Danish government. She decided to use clay because, once fired, it can withstand the elements—even Arctic winters. The large piece, 230 cm tall, is an example of clay’s versatility. It was created as a relief, a sculptural method in which the pieces remain attached to a backing of the same material. Nuliajuk looks out from the bottom left-hand side of the artwork, a reminder of the traditional Inuit justice system: the natural world and its consequences for not living in the good way. Nuliajuk’s hair swirls around her face, symbolizing both the keeper of sea animals and the ice fjords of Kalaallit Nunaat. To her right is a section of the crest of the Royal Danish Police Force, and above, a hand with an eye, “which is the first and oldest symbol for Danish law and order, dating back to the year 1709.”
Lisbeth Karline Poulsen A close up of Nakkutilliisut (The Guardians) (2024) © THE ARTIST
Poulsen created the piece at the KIMIK workshops in several small sections, which she pieced together to form the finished artwork. The first section—the critical piece with Nuliajuk’s face—exploded in the kiln: a heartbreaking occurrence for a ceramic artist, but sadly part of the process. Raw clay must dry out fully before it’s fired. The piece will explode when heated if there are tiny amounts of moisture trapped within it. Poulsen had to redo her hard work and was able to make a second relief of Nuliajuk’s face that survived the kiln. She told me, “When it was hard I remembered the love of the work . . . nothing comes out bad when you love what you are doing.”
Lisbeth Karline Poulsen Nakkutilliisut (The Guardians) (2024) on the Ilulissat Police Station in Kalaallit Nunaat © THE ARTIST
Poulsen has used ceramics in other artworks and exhibitions as well, notably in the show Fisker-I, Fangeren, Frisørenilu (The Fisher, the Hunter, and the Hairdresser) (2023) at the Ilulissat Art Museum and Greenlandic House in Copenhagen. The exhibition was a “quiet tribute to everyday life.” She used air-dry clay to create another sculptural relief of an Inuit face, contrasting the traditional role of fishing in Ilulissat with newer roles such as hairdressing to “focus on roles and gender.” The fisherman in the ceramic relief peers out from behind modern green fishing lines. His expression is strong, yet he seems trapped by his traditions and his role within society. He contemplates whether his role remains important or necessary. Other artworks in the exhibit utilize the same fishing rope to frame portraits, used as a highlight instead of a fence.
In a rapidly changing world, the tension between tradition and modernity is very present across Poulsen’s work. Her large-scale artworks are an example of the versatility of clay, used by diverse artists to create meaningful artworks and carry culture across space and time.
Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona is an Inuit multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Ottawa, ON. Her work includes ceramics, prints and major visual art commissions, incorporating everyday objects that have symbolic meanings for Inuit, which she reframes through a modern lens. In 2023 Kabloona was shortlisted for the Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award.
NOTES
1 All quotes Ivínguak’ Stork Høegh, interview with Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona, April 2025.
2 All quotes Nuuna Papis Chemnitz, interview with Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona, April 2025.
3 All quotes Lisbeth Karline Poulsen, interview Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona, April 2025.