No, Man is an Island (2021)
Though human beings seem to have an eternal longing for co-existence, I find it that we always end up realizing the impossibility of it. Paper fascinates me because it holds that same dualism: strength and fragility, which mirrors the psychological relationship between humans. How to exist together?
For the exhibition Gul Festival 2021, I worked with paper made from local vegetation. The plants have been harvested from a circle as big as an armslength around myself. The vegetation has been processed and moulded into a concrete form taken from an old hay rack found on location.
During Covid lockdown, "social distance" became the vocabulary for a new phenomenon, but to me it was rather a manifestation af an invisible distance that has always been present among people who are inherently lonely together.
This piece was made in Hygum Kunstmuseum, the art museum founded by Lisbet Hermansen, who also is the self-acclaimed sheriff of the town Dybe, which she has dubbed Country Town (a very rural small town near Lemvig, Denmark). Hermansen is somewhat of a character in the ara, and not everyone loves what she's doing. Most likely because she insists on intervening and on creating a space on her own terms, whilst also inviting everyone to paticipate in flipping the world upside down.
She is also an acclaimed and very experienced artist, and during my stay with her I got the chance to understand her concept of Lebenkunst (living art). How all of her life is intertwined with the life situation she places herself in, in Country Town, in the politics and fights over culture around her and with her.
The circle of vegetation, which was used to make the paper, left a cut-off mark next to the building of Hygum Kunstmuseum.
No, Man is an Island II /
at Galleri Otte (En Have)
The experiment was repeated later in 2021 during the exhibition En Have (A Garden) set in a an allotment garden in Copenhagen.
As the setting was restricted in other ways, I found myself investigating the very physical boarders of the little garden house parcels, the pathways that connected and them and the bushes and fences that kept them apart. Here was a spot in nature much more orchestrated than the wilderness of Hygum.
In both cases, there was always the mental guarding of one’s own space.
I gathered a part of the grass closest to the fence and left the area covered for a week’s time to make a pale spot of grass as to mark the area of space.
The mould was made on the surface of a grate found by the entrance of the house.
