Wahlquist was born in northern Germany in 1983, and her practice moves fluidly between painting, collage, sculpture and ceramics. Her work places the long tradition of European figurative painting alongside a brighter, more open attention to nature. Her images tend to begin from a mood  or an inner feeling rather than a narrative, and ask to be inhabited, not read. A recognisable motif, such as a flower, a body, a vessel or a room, functions less as a subject than as a trigger, a way of evoking something that resists direct representation. Again and again she turns to family, friendship and a private, almost spiritual inner life, approached with a subtle sense of humour about the strangeness of ordinary things.

Painting was the medium Wahlquist studied and practised for many years. When the pandemic arrived and touch became almost forbidden, she was spending some time in Stockholm and decided to visit a small ceramic studio and start learning with clay. She fell in love with the material at once and went there every day. Her ceramics give physical form to her interest in images that point beyond themselves.  The vessels, jugs and candlesticks she makes keep the shape of utilitarian objects, with their handles, rims, stems and arms. Roses, tendrils, ribbons and embedded growths gather across their surfaces until each piece seems covered in vegetation, as if a garden had quietly taken over a piece of tableware. A candlestick turns into a small figure with outstretched arms, and an amphora begins to suggest a body. The pieces sit somewhere between function and art.

Each piece is hand-built, not thrown on a wheel. Coils, slabs and pinched forms leave their mark in visible joins, fingerprints, leaning walls and uneven edges, and the sculpted flowers are added in layers, so they look more like growth than  decoration. Her glazes are saturated and mottled, moving through jade and white, cobalt and cream, acid yellow, wine and vermilion. They pool and drip, and in places the bare white clay shows through. Ornament is often handled with more care than the bodies that hold it, so delicate petals rest on rough, pitted surfaces. This tension between preciousness and awkwardness gives the work much of its power.

Wahlquist approaches ceramics the way she approaches painting, except that now, as she puts it, ‘my cups can hold water and I can eat with my spoons.’ These works are translations of painting into volume. On canvas, she suggests the depth of a rose with a few strokes of dark red over pink; in clay, the rose is folded, pinched and stacked, and each petal casts its own shadow. A tendril that would be a single line in a painting becomes a coil rising from the body of the vessel. A streak of colour becomes a glaze that swirls across a surface you can walk around.

Several habits from painting survive the move. Flowers cluster and overlap as in a still life, and colour behaves like paint. The vessel reads as a background, a field on which  an image is built, more than as a container. Yet the forms are clearly sculptural: they lean and sag under their own ornament, and their backs and bases matter. Candlesticks and lamps rise like towers of separate episodes: a column, a braided band, even fragments of ceramics broken during the making, or remnants of her own or found pieces. A flower and an open arm form a composition stacked vertically rather than spread across a canvas. A flower in a painting is an illusion held in place by a frame. In clay, it is something real, with weight, edges and fragility, something that can be touched, chipped or knocked over. Viewers feel as though they have stepped into the painting, or as though the painting has made its way into the room.