I hosted and made clay bowls for a Full Moon Gathering: Fire and Clay event in Losæter, Oslo, together with artist Erik Sjödin. The event was arranged by Flatbread Society. The bowls are rough, unglazed earthenware hastily made without thinking much about their appearance except that they should have rounded bottoms so you cannot put them aside when they contain the hot soup. Thanks also to Marius Presterud and Sara Björke for the baking of flat bread and support in harvesting and cooking and Mania Rapti for great images.

“ Fire­making, agriculture, pottery, astronomy, were marvellous collective leaps: dominations rather than adaptations. For thousands of years men must have dreamed, vainly, of further short­cuts and controls. ­“

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization.

On November 4 2017, artists and researcher Erik Sjödin and artist and craftist Linus Ersson will host a Full Moon Gathering at Losæter in Oslo. For the occasion Erik Sjödin and Linus Ersson will cook and serve soup from vegetables harvested at Losæter. Using both ancient and recent techniques, materials, and methods the artists will explore connections between fire, pottery, agriculture, and cooking.

The soup will be cooked on a mobile wood fired rocket stove kitchen which is part of “We Still Carry the Fire”, a project in which Erik Sjödin explores various human relationships to fire by creating opportunities for social interaction and cooking using fire.

The soup will be served in clay bowls produced by Linus Ersson especially for the Full Moon Gathering at Losæter. Ersson has imagined how the first prehistoric clay bowls may have looked like, how they were made and why. Research tells us that their bottoms were rounded to avoid cracking while fired. If we want to be able to put our hot bowls aside we will have to do like they did back then: Go outside and squeeze them into the ground.