60 . NOV/2015 . WISH

for a sculpture to adorn a home on the headland north of bondi beach,

sydney artist mika utzon popov wanted bricks that he could remould.

it took a journey back to his native denmark to find them.

wonder walls

o make a brick by hand you put a lump of warm, soft clay into a wooden mould and, with one hand on top of the other, press hard to ensure it fills the void. Brickmakers say the clay remembers: it holds its shape when the mould is removed, and if it’s pushed or pulled after that, it will

return to the original form. For the most significant commission of his career, artist Mika Utzon Popov must break that memory and coax flat bricks into curves and contours like a landscape. He’s never worked with clay but wants to make a sculpture using handmade bricks from a factory in southern Denmark whose owner has turned brickmaking into an art form.

In April, Utzon Popov travelled from his home on Sydney’s northern beaches to Nybøl Nor, the cove where Christian Petersen’s family first started making bricks 224 years ago. Petersen, who owns and runs Petersen Tegl, put all his staff at the artist’s disposal to work out a way to get the bricks to do what he wanted.

When we meet at the brickworks two weeks later, Utzon Popov is almost sure he can. Walking around Petersen Tegl’s light-filled factory, he says this project is a turning point in his practice and an emotional reconnection with his Danish creative roots after living and working in Sydney for 10 years. He reflects on what he learnt as a child from his grandfather Jørn Utzon, whose ethos of working on the edge of the possible is embodied in his masterpiece, the Sydney Opera House.

“One of the great gifts that my grandfather gave me was this love of testing, of pushing, of remaining open, being honest, listening,” he says. Utzon Popov grew up on the edge of a forest in Hellebæk, in northern Zealand, with his mother, the ceramicist Lin Utzon. His grandparents lived a 10-minute walk away. “I spent a lot of time with my grandfather and he’s definitely on many, many levels been an inspiration and a mentor on life and love and art.” But that greatness also cast a shadow over his grandson’s ambitions.

“When I was younger I had this idea that I somehow had to achieve the same level of thinking that he was able to,” says Utzon Popov, who turned 44 while working at Petersen Tegl. “But as I have gotten older I

have realised I’m not him and it’s a great freedom to let that go and appreciate whatever it was that he taught or what he brought to the conversation and evolve into your own conversation.”

Utzon Popov is a great talker and he talks a lot about conversations: with his grandfather (“we didn’t make things, we talked”), with his art practice, with nature, even the way a Danish sofa he likes is designed for conversing rather than lounging. It was a desire for a deeper conversation that drew him back to Denmark to work. Utzon Popov first moved to Sydney in 1988 to complete high school, went back and forth a couple of times and settled more permanently in 2005.

In Sydney, until recently, he struggled to find likeminded collaborators. He thinks there’s a deeper dialogue about art and architecture happening across Scandinavia and even found it on the floor of the brickworks. “On every level of this factory everyone is interested,” he says. “They’re interested in what we’re doing, how we can take it in a different direction, how we can we make this work because no one knows whether it will work.” For contrast he cites a conversation with a Sydney property developer about including art in a project to meet council requirements. Calling the council’s points-for-art system “ridiculous”, the developer asked Utzon Popov for an idea before warning him not to get too carried away as he had no money anyway. “So you think it’s not a great starting point.”

Nevertheless, he is in Nybøl Nor because of enlightened Sydney clients who had enough faith and wherewithal to back him without knowing what would happen. Michael Darling and Manuela Darling-Gansser, are friends of his father, Sydney architect Alex Popov, and their architect Nick Tobias is a windsurfing mate of Utzon Popov’s. They commissioned a sculpture for a courtyard garden in their new home on the Ben Buckler headland at Bondi Beach (see our story on page 64), having admired the stunning 7m-long work called Coast he’d made for another property nearby.

For that project Utzon Popov hand-carved five polyurethane foam moulds, which he transferred by way of a silicon mould and then finally cast in concrete. For the new sculpture he wanted to use the same technique but make it more about the intersection of art and architecture. So, he decided to lay brick tiles, which are half the width and thickness of a Kolumba — a Petersen

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WISH . NOV/2015 . 61

mika utzon popov (in black and white) visited the petersen tegl brickworks in nybøl nor

(in colour) to make special bricks for a sculpture for a house on bondi

beach’s ben buckler headland.

62 . NOV/2015 . WISH

speciality brick — on top. The concrete base represents a natural structure overlaid by the geometry of architecture.

“The bricks on top follow the contour the way architecture sits in the landscape and effectively has to abide by whatever natural environment sits around it, ” he says. He took his cue from the Kolumba bricks Tobias used as a screen on the northeastern façade of the multi-level home. The long thin bricks are stacked lengthways and sideways with increasing gaps as they get to the upper levels, adding a three-dimensional sculptural element to another otherwise solid off-form concrete house. They surround what Tobias calls a vertical courtyard, throwing beautiful dappled light around the house while providing privacy and ventilation. “Everything we do is function-driven initially, then we create the beauty and charm in it so that it’s not pure functionalism,” says Tobias. He and Michael Darling visited the Petersen Tegl factory last year where they met Petersen and even made a brick by hand. Tobias has his “Nick brick” in his office.

When I visit the factory Christian Petersen greets me wearing a velvet jacket silkscreened with a brick pattern by a Venetian artist. He proudly shows off the royal assent signed by King Christian VII in May 1791, granting permission for his great-great-great-great-grandfather Peter Andresen to make bricks on the site. “He would never have thought we would be shipping bricks to 38 countries,” says Petersen, who’s chuffed that Petersen Tegl has started exporting bricks for flooring to Italy.

he was designing from the ruins of the gothic Saint Kolumba Church. He approached Petersen and, after costly experimentation with centuries-old techniques, they created what became known as the Kolumba brick. Zumthor used the light grey brick for monolithic walls, punctured with gaps that let through filtered light.

When Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen first saw Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum, the bricks charmed him. “Although they often have thumbprints in the stone or abnormalities from the baking process they are very robust but still retain an artisanal appeal. This speaks strongly to my work and my appreciation of honest and pure materials,” he says. Van Duysen used the same K51 brick for a house in Flanders where bricks of many hues are a traditional building material. Their stone-like colour aligned with his client’s desire for a contemporary and minimal mood and also created a “bright and sober” contrast to the high trees and dense hedges that border the site. “The form and colour of the Petersen Kolumba tile enriched the aesthetics of the project and emphasised the strong horizontal and monolithic character of the architecture,” Van Duysen says, adding that their overall appearance is calming and peaceful.

Tobias cites the Japanese aesthetic of “wabi-sabi”, a sort of imperfect beauty, to describe their effect. “A brick is usually associated with quite an unsophisticated unit, whereas this is a very beautiful long, slender, elegant thing.” He says that visitors to the Bondi house always want to know more. “They go up and touch them a lot because it’s an interesting material.”

Melbourne architect Robert Simeoni used charcoal-grey Kolumba bricks for a new home in South Yarra. He says they bring a warmth and “level of engagement” to the house’s austere and abstract composition. “The brickwork — the colour and the proportion of it — is just enough to make it a very interesting simplicity rather than something that looks a little bit cold and uninteresting.” Kolumba bricks cost many times that of a normal brick but Simeoni says this is more than repaid. “We all saw, in a way, a value for money for what it gave back to the project.”

Christian Petersen says Kolumba changed the perception of bricks through its shape and the range of textures and shades achieved by varying temperatures in the firing process. At last count there were 30 colours, although he’s always pushing his employees for more. One of them, Lars “Lasse” Truelsen, says their running joke about the boss is: “It’s hard to make a miracle but it’s much, much harder to explain to Christian why we can’t make it, so we go for the miracle.”

Utzon Popov wasn’t seeking a miracle but he was venturing into the unknown. His three weeks in the brick factory were intense and invigorating. He returned in July, to check how the 132 bricks had dried, and decided against glazing them. He will finish the work in Sydney, reshaping the moulds to fit the fired bricks and then casting the base in concrete. He hopes to have the finished artwork in situ in Bondi by the end of the year. There’ll be no mistaking its origins, he says. “The concept of this work is to let the simplicity of the clay and the fact that these are bricks be the main storyline, without translation.” W

“everything we do is function-driven initially,

then we create the beauty and charm in it.”

After taking over from his father in 1970 Petersen transformed the family business from a mass producer of standard bricks to an atelier making artisanal ones. He’s proud that when you drive from Sønderborg airport the two tall smokestacks you see on the horizon are Petersen Tegl’s. The taller one was part of a neighbouring company, a conventional brickmaker that went broke. Petersen bought the factory and is reconfiguring it to expand production of the handmade Kolumba brick, for which there has been a six-month waiting list. Petersen Tegl uses machines to make other bricks in larger quantities but the Kolumba is what Petersen calls the “haute couture” of bricks.

Petersen’s employees say his heart is made of bricks. His life is dedicated to the brickworks and his family — they are almost one and the same. He lives in a former stables on the brickworks which his grandfather restored, two daughters are on the board, and he talks about his grandchildren as the ninth-generation owners.

Utzon Popov says when he rang Petersen to ask whether he could come to the factory and turn bricks into an artwork, “Christian just said ‘yes’, straight away — ‘anything new you want to try, we will help you out’.”

Petersen has always had this attitude, not just with artists but also with architects seeking something better than a basic brick. Fifteen years ago Swiss architect Peter Zumthor wanted a long, slim brick, like the ones used in ancient Rome, for an art museum in Cologne

kolumba bricks by petersen tegl give a ‘calming and peaceful’ appearance to a house

in flanders by belgian architect vincent van duysen, above, and ‘an interesting simplicity’

to an austere design in south yarra by melbourne architect robert simeoni,

left and top left.