ARTIST STATEMENT
Artist statementI work with sculptural installation that emerges in relation to the architecture of a place. I want to challenge physical space. The way that material and surroundings meet is important. It’s about a dynamic collaboration between the room, the material and myself.
A material’s physical expression and its history are the starting point for the installations. I often use industrial materials that have an inherent capacity that we usually are oblivious to. In a warehouse for construction materials we see only a product’s function. I want to see the materials from another point of view—in this way we can see that the materials have their own expression.
In the materials’ own history there manifests the fact that everything is part of an enormous cycle. Nothing disappears, it just takes a different form: the isolation mats, for example, in the installation "Triumph and Disaster" that consist of used clothes and textile industry surplus. Clothes have followed people’s lives literally very closely—with all that this implies. All of history adds further layers to the work, allows it to be seen in a continuing context.
I do not tie myself to a fixed plan—place and material guide me. That is why the process is clearly visible in the finished piece. I want to achieve an immediate and vital expression. The work can appear to be a moment frozen in time in a process that may at any instant continue.
I work with contrasts: the open-and-closed, building-up-and-knocking-down, place-no-place. The installations are a kind of landscape filled with elements that seek coherence.
Most often a catastrophe is not final but rather a definitive turning point. The place where one falls becomes fertile ground, upon which one can build something new and by which one can go forward. The balance between the destructive and the constructive is just as important in my working process as in life as a whole.
Translated by Paul Parker