I work with sculpture and text, where several parts are woven together into installations based in performativity, materiality and story telling tradition.
I am interested in how the body meets the room. When I went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, I used to walk to the studio with the intention that I was my little toe, that my perception of the world therefore proceeded from it. It's a type of exercise I have continued with to constantly re-understand from what perspective I perceive my surroundings. For me, performativity is a working method for understanding. I am inspired by what the anthropologist François Laplantine calls a choreographic practice, where you allow yourself to be shaped and reshaped by what you encounter, as opposed to a topographical practice where you observe and appropriate.
I work with materials that surround me. The piece of wood I find on my way to the studio, the piece of plastic in the ditch, the conversation with the chimney sweeper and/or the text I suddenly remembered reading 5 years ago. Together they talk about both the present and the past and the relationship between them. I intuitively pick up a material, in it I find a form that I clarify - by working with it I understand meaning, the meaning then informs the work with my texts. Sometimes the form may say more about me than about the room I find it in, but I see it as a portrait of the meeting between body and time - A dialogue between the individual and society.
When I grew up in Värmland, I had difficulty with the Värmland characteristic of constantly stretching experiences. I found it hard to relate to never knowing if people were telling the truth and whether they themselves believed their stories. Bishop Johan Alfred Eklund is said to have said "In Värmland, no salvation is possible, half the people are poets and the rest mythomaniacs." In adulthood, this is a heritage I have come to value. The story is a strategy, not to find answers, but to talk about what is beyond true and false, to make visible what is in the borderland. The story can both define time and space and at the same time dissolve them.