Marit Tingleff was born in 1954 and studied at the College of Art and Design in Bergen in the mid 1970s. She is one of the most individual voices in European ceramics, combining great abilities both as a ceramist and as a painter, demonstrated notably in her plates and platters, many scaled up to great size, familiar domestic forms made into monumental wall pieces. They are canvasses for her highly expressive brushwork and marking, and show a close relationship between object and drawing, where colour, line and texture convey a powerful sense of patina, of areas of rethinking, revision and rubbing through.

This is an abstraction of some struggle, bearing out that notion that art should be a matter not of design and easy resolution, but of an ongoing and difficult dialogue, both for artist and spectator. There is a rare ambition here, not so much in the scale, though that is a technical feat, but in the depth and range of her marking, in its refreshing unpredictability and changes of tack. Moreover the work is materially and imaginatively generous.

David Whiting