COPENHELL’s 2025 festival identity is based on the Danish artist Rose Eken’s clay sculpture ‘Diana’ – a goddess in Roman and Hellenistic religion, primarily considered a patroness of the countryside and nature, hunters, wildlife, childbirth, crossroads, the night, and the Moon. She is often depicted as a huntress.

In recent years, Eken’s sculptures have turned towards what has affectionately been dubbed her “dark period.” The colorful glazes and charmingly haphazard accumulations of everyday items have been substituted with an esoteric universe of withered medicinal plants, tarot cards, ritual daggers, spell crystals and other occult paraphernalia, all rendered in shades of glistening blacks, dark greens and burgundies, aged gold and oxidized silver.

The range of her sources of inspiration has correspondingly expanded from largely 20^th century popular cultural references to archaic myths, classical sculpture and medieval alchemy, mixed in with modern witchcraft, Fantasy tropes, black metal, and esoteric religions. 

The sculpture ‘Diana’ is part of a series of sculptures titled ‘Sisters of the Moon’, which consists of five goddess busts in total, glazed with iridescent greenish, black and yellow glazes. The goddesses are hybrids of various historical female artists and archetypes, and appear as if they are frozen in a transformation between the human and the non-human, between culture and nature. 

This circle of motifs became an occasion to challenge the possibilities of ceramics and search for a balance between complex, naturalistic figurations and their resolution by virtue of the abstract glazing. Here Eken experimented with new, biomorphic glazing techniques in an attempt to evoke the tactile in organic patterns and materials such as e.g. animal fur, moss, lichen and bark.

 ‘Diana’ is also the most autobiographical of the five bust, as she is modelled from pictures of the artist aged 16, where she had long green hair down to her hips. Also, her sister Cecilie Eken, who is an acclaimed Danish children's author, wrote a novel called 'Sølvblomst' in 2002, which was inspired by Ekens green hair as a teen. It is a story of a girl who is half human, half plant. This novel has in turn been a source of inspiration for the sculpture 'Diana' and the 'Sisters of the Moon' Series.

About the artist:

Rose Eken is a kind of maverick with one tentacle in every world. Part punk, part opera lover, part witch, and somehow always the epitome of a contemporary artist. She was raised with opera and classical music, a tradition which she has both embraced and rebelled against. 

As a teenage punk, Eken worked at concert venues and became fully immersed in the world of alternative music - a love and appreciation which has also been an incredibly rich source of inspiration in her art practice. It’s perhaps incorrect to say that alternative culture is a source of inspiration, it’s, in a sense, Eken’s medium.

Recently, in her almost habitually anthropological fashion, Eken’s practice has been focused on occultism and witchcraft in its contemporary forms, a subject which she treats with the same empathy, intelligence and humour, as she does with the myriad of themes her works engages with.