The Beginning of Everything
Artist art Talk at the Charles H. MacNider Art Museum August 2, 2025 at 4pm
I will give a talk about my latest body of work exhibited at the MacNider Art Museum August 1- October 1, 2025. This is my first museum solo exhibit and I am thrilled to discuss my latest colorful nudes and murmuration evolution.
Exhibit statement:
The word objectification has a number of meanings: it implies subjecting the figure to an object, but in the case of sculpture it also literally refers to the act of creating objects. We see its rich implications in the art of Annick Ibsen, who uses her ongoing introspection into ceramics as a medium and language. The works displayed here are part figure, part object, part question.
In The Beginning of Everything, for the first time Ibsen combines her interest in the figure with glazes traditionally used on utilitarian clay objects to question whether we see the object or the figure first. These figures are no longer someone; they have become something. This shift is unsettling—and it should be. But this transformation also opens a space for intimacy and relationship. In sculpting a figure, Ibsen doesn’t just capture a likeness; She confronts the profound tension between presence and distance, between knowing and knower. The object on the pedestal is not just the residue of a body—it is a record of looking, of reaching, of the distance with the Other. When fired to high temperatures, what remains is a skin that has survived fire—cracked, luminous, resistant to final interpretation.
Figures, like starlings, carry traces of relation. When gathered, they evoke murmuration not in form but in feeling: an unseen, often fragile network of responses, gestures, dependencies. A starling murmuration is a choreography of bodies in constant negotiation. How do we exist among others and hold our shape when the world bends around us? The murmurations remind us that even the most solitary form exists within a field of motion and meaning.
Where birds make a sky-body, Ibsen’s figures form a ground-body: anchored, fractured, unresolved—both always in conversation.
Art Talk with the Society of the Friends of the Ceramic Museum of Sèvres , Oct. 11, 2022
To listen to the presentation in French: https://youtu.be/0A7ec8lsjCA
« Une céramiste américaine de tradition française »
“Pour cette 31ème Conversations Céramiques, nous serons en direct des Etats-unis : Peintre, scuplteur et céramiste à Des Moines (Iowa), Annick Ibsen, qui a connu un large éventail de cultures en Libye, en Indonésie, à Hong Kong, en Inde et à Paris et à Londres, évoquera pour nous, en français, son impressionnant parcours personnel et artistique” - Catherine Trouvet, Vice-Présidente de la Société des Amis du musée national de Céramique de Sèvres
Ecouter la présentation sur Youtube:
https://youtu.be/0A7ec8lsjCA