About the work

 

I am under the spell of illusions … Since ever I have always treasured ‘the first impression’, the first sight – and I want to prolong it, not letting facts and knowledge interfere. The eyes see in a second other beings and objects than what we later use another part of the brain to see. This very short moment before the brain decides what to see, is what I try to capture: the first impression that the eye catches…this  illusion has a certain right to exist, to be looked at a little closer…..and then what? Is it still an illusion, and what name should it have?  If someone gave me three wishes, one of them would be to creep into the skin of an animal….just for a while. Being both simple and very complex I cherish these doubtful moments, and this is what I have been working on with my present work. I run a kind of disorganized basic research in the silicate group, which is the major ingredient in ’glass’. Persistantly I try to persuade the glass to accept materials, that is it in fact related to. A third material appears, a sort of super matter. I explore these new (sometimes ancient, for I am not always the first) composit materials’ aesthetic and physical potential, exposing them to all conceivable techniques, partly with the knowledge of traditional techniques of glass and ceramic craftsmanship in mind and partly techniques that the new materials themselves spontaneously leads me to. In this process, where openness to materials creates the work, the new material often kickstarts a new expression; this produces delightful moments, when the matter puts me in a state of forgetting of what I’ve learned – and this grows new super species. The result is often unexpected and feels like a present – a gift.

But it’s no secret, that if someone gave me three wishes, one of them would be to creep in the skin of an animal….just for a while.

 

What comes to me, I’m after. But I am not welcoming all appearances – most of them will be sent away and asked not to show up again, others will just be ignored in everydays haste. And then there are the tenascious ones, that persistently ask for body and matter. They will be encircled by a contour line in a piece of paper. Another hasty portrait in my sketchbook. Then some day one of them gets so loudy, that I suddenly know, I have missed it for a long time, and it will have its body of glass.