Rituals and Spells
With vibrant, intuitive color palettes and atemporal figurative compositions, I study my own limitations by exploring speculative images. Human-like bodies, non-human bodies and strange environments create an open-ended collective, often presenting unaccustomed scenes. Through color, form and line I carefully capture a veil of ambiguous unease to welcome the unknown and share it. I work not only with relations between various bodies on canvas, but explore experiences and memories shaped by current realities, which with care I transform into a new visual world. A horizontal way of seeing earth and its inhabitants is important to evoke clarity in all ambiguously depicted subjects, known or unknown. This speculative world negotiates both closeness and empathy, as well as isolation and stiffness.
To me, art and life on earth are interrelational; the work I make is inescapably affected by the happenings of human and non-human life. I navigate between my own concerns and the effects I produce, as an artist. By applying a posthuman subjectivity lens, I believe that humans or non-humans are not just self contained beings but depend on various relations between each other. The same goes both for the painted images and the process of painting, as I also depend on the materials and happenings around me to create a painting. To embrace relationality on earth, the paintings hold various traces to connect the subjects. On a painting surface it is a brush, a finger, a cloth, a scraper, a stick, but in an image it becomes a part of a collective narrative. Texture leaves a trace. Who or what left it and why or how? To me, it is a way to depict actions or labour that may not even be familiar.
As I paint various bodies to construct a composition, I think of the actions that non-human bodies are performing with or despite human bodies. To show that, I use familiar and unfamiliar shapes that have activity of their own, which is made by creating traces with paint or markmaking. The human-like bodies that are not direct representations of personalities or identities, I source from what is most familiar to me, as I cannot escape it, but it is there to represent an entity living on this earth, neither woman nor man, nor other social identity. My goal is not to depict exactly what I see, it is more to transform the experience of life into an image that will become another part of life. I do search for a kind of uncomfortable otherness that sometimes stems from discomfort and I try to turn it over in the canvas. With few indications of pictorial depth, distinctions between solid ground and atmosphere are blurred, so that space or gravity is elusive.
