Made of equal matter Heart Museum of Contemporary Art, 2024
  
Local clay pigment, casein, bees wax, linseed oil, canvas.
 
Ida Raselli works with wild clay and other pieces of nature. For the artist, collecting is a method of being in touch with one’s own sensibility and sharpening the understanding of the gaze: what we are attracted to and how it changes over time. It is a cyclical process dependent on the seasons, and it contains a natural maintenance of boundaries, with intercalated breaks and times of acceleration.

For the work series Made of equal matter, Raselli has
collected wild clay from local clay and marl pits which she has subsequently processed; dried, fired, ground into pigments, and worked on canvas. Marl is a calcareous type of clay that farmers used until industrialization to spread on the fields to improve the soil’s pH value and fertility. The high content of lime is due to the fact that the marl contains very many microfossils, whose skeletal parts consist of lime, from a period when large parts of Denmark’s territory was under water. Until industrialization, Danish agriculture was deeply dependent on, through joint efforts, excavating
and distributing this valuable nourishment, deposited in the ground over millions of years. The moorland around Herning is characterized by a low pH, so adding lime in the form of marl could increase the value.
The use of marl played a major role in the cultivation of the Jutland heath. Today, nitrogen from synthetic fertilizers and animal manure is primarily used in agriculture, which, exempt from the demanding workload, is easier to acquire and use in abundant quantities. Fired at approximately 1000 degrees Celsius, marl and other clay are transformed into a red-toned color scale known from Danish building tradition and the brick walls of Højhuset.

With Made of equal matter Raselli reflects on humans’s
material components, deep history and relationship to the earth’s resources. It is an aesthetic study of Højhuset’s
architecture and the area’s underground, and a suggestion of a mapping of the regions color palette.