Storm Philippa Clarén - Donna Queen of the Mermaids

Artist: Storm Philippa Clarén

Donna is made with coiled beige lava clay, painted with underglazes and finished with a transparent glaze. The earrings are painted with four different glazes, while the leaves in the hair are painted with a green metallic glaze.

Donna is inspired by Frida Kahlo, Circe, the mythological sorceress from ancient Greece, and Marie Antoinette. Circe is also the central figure in Madeline Miller’s novel Circe. Donna is a kind of queen figure among the my mermaids.

Storm Philippa Clarén’s distinctive visual language merges playful materiality with poetic form, primarily through sculptural work in ceramics. At the core of her practice lies an exploration of ornamentation, glossy surfaces and a visual idiom infused with both nostalgia and absurdity. Her pieces, often humorous and sometimes melancholic, invite viewers into spaces that hover between the everyday and the fantastical, between memory and material presence. She describes her attraction to shimmering objects as an intuitive impulse, a way to reclaim the value of the ornate, the extravagant and the frequently overlooked.

In contrast to the restraint of Scandinavian minimalism, Clarén proposes a language of abundance that is richly textured, tactile and boldly expressive. Through ceramic objects and installations, she crafts narratives of longing, guilt and reconciliation, recurring themes in her ongoing investigation of the human inner landscape. Her practice can be understood as a form of contemporary artifact making, where material, color and form come together to give shape to the shimmering terrain of the subconscious.

Storm Philippa Clarén (b. 1995) lives and works in Malmö. She holds a BFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (2020).