Oblique Lattice
2024–2025
“Oblique Lattice” is the working-title for my current paintings. Lightly brushed washes of colour drip, spill, bleed and flare in stark and ornamental ways. The slanting and interlocking structural lines, floating colour and uneven edges give the illusion of a slightly padded, quilted surface. In preparation for each painting I make numerous drawings on millimetre paper to work out the scale of the grid, gradient of line, and overall composition. After much experimentation, I have established a painting procedure in which I adhere to two layers of colour and no reworking of the result.
Atlas
2020
A simple grid structure functions as a scaffold that contains, directs and defines successive washes of diluted paint. The painting process draws on gravity to make vertical linear traces of the running paint. Each painting is a concentrate of one colour. A sequence of variables and permutations are set in motion. Irregularities of hand, line and mark, variations in colour, pattern and rhythm determine the perceptual shifts in the pictorial space. As these variables unfold they become the elements that activate and identify each painting.
Acrylic paint on linen canvas, 195 x 150 cm each
Länk
Inauguration July 2017
Glass-mosaic murals, Odenplan Station, Stockholm City Line commuter rail network
Public Commission: SL Storstockholms Lokaltrafik
250 x 1625 cm and 250 x 2090 cm
Located in a central connecting area of the vast underground surroundings of the Odenplan station, the work examines and celebrates movement through urban spaces. The colourful chain-motif represents connection, sequence and succession of events.
Colouring strips of paper with wax crayons to make paper chains, and the way the hanging of these decorative chains activated and dramatically changed the space is a vivid childhood memory. A combination of this memory with questions about the function of ornament was the starting point for this commission.
Moving through the station, with its busy hustle and bustle and moments of calm solitude and detachment, the physical impression of space, scale, and colour shapes our behaviour and response. The large mosaics function as a visual symbol and physical marker that facilitate recognition and navigation in the underground passages. Movement through the space activates changing perspectives of the detailed mosaic surfaces.
Chains and Garlands
2011–2014
Painting - sculptural canvas objects - installation
Driven by an interest in the function and significance of ornament and the diverse responses that the aesthetic device of ornament can elicit, I started to rework images of decorative paraphernalia such as garlands, chains, ribbons, frills and fringes. Painted monochrome canvases are folded and unfolded or cut into strips to make canvas chains and garland objects. The works combine formal and material restraint with notions of excess, exaggeration, and celebration.
Achilles
2010,c-print, 100 x 120 cm
A modest gravestone simply inscribed with the name Achilles.
Mind How You Go
2010,c-print, 100 x 120 cm
Folly
2006–2008
This body of work includes two installations and a series of paintings. The sound of a lone blackbird accompanied the exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2008). In its own meandering way it is aspects of consciousness and making sense that is the focus of "Folly".
A folly is a building that to a great extent functions as ornament. The best follies are wonderfully mad and eccentric constructions. As monuments to affluence and excess they seem to represent both function and dysfunction in society.
As a source for this project I investigated the ideas, language, and narratives of "The Fold", a concept connected to baroque art, architecture and metaphysics that poetically imagines the world in terms of infinite folds of movement, time and space. Leibniz, the baroque philosopher and polymath, viewed the world as "a body of infinite folds that weave through compressed time and space".
Painting as a three-dimensional construction: the multi-layered horizontal expanse of Trouble in Utopia draws attention to the ground we stand on and the spaces we move through. The painted elements of each colour-stack are carefully placed but not fixed. The work consists of a delicate balance of colour, structure, light, space, and movement.
Fearful Symmetry is comprised of ten paintings and a constellation of five linear, floor-based wood structures that create and suggest a different order and movement through the space. The silver coloured paintings originate from large paint blots that echo and enlarge the making of ink blots images. During the exhibition the loose components of the precisely stacked two deep by two wide Small Walls get disturbed by unsuspecting visitors. Some people react by carefully rebuilding, others move swiftly on and away.
Pure and Promiscuous
2001–2005
Working with photographic images I wanted to take a closer look at issues of nature and narration connected to aspects of gender and vanity.
I am Nature
2001, series of 8 c-prints, 84 x 69 cm each
The title refers to Jackson Pollock's famous response to the question: Why don’t you paint nature?
I was thinking about the anthropomorphic identification with nature as a physical body, the impulse of attributing nature with human sensitivity and emotion: a recognition of the interrelation of human and nature, and of being nature.
These photographs of trees intertwined with fences were taken in central Oslo.
Close
2002–2004, series of 10 pairs, c-print, 100 x 83 cm (x 2)
A collection of 'strangely familiar' episodes and obscure narratives. Paradoxical phrases such as ‘pointedly foolish’, ‘seriously funny’, ‘bitter sweet’ and ‘pretty ugly', provided the starting point for this series of paired photographs. The word ‘close’ changes due to context and inflection, shifting meaning from the near and connected into an enclosed place or a stifling atmosphere. 'Close' can be similarity and a sense of proximity.
Lattice and Tartan
1997–2001
Painting – Three-dimensional constructions – Installation
Imagine Piet Mondrian dancing boogie-woogie in a kilt.
In this body of work the horizontal and vertical directions of the grid meet textile connotations and questions of clan identity. Scottish tartans are vibrant grid patterns traditionally woven as a woollen cloth, each clan with their own colours, pattern and motto. The geometric framework of the grid is a basic formal device that became an emblem, heroic motto and leitmotif of modernism. Weaving and stacking are foundations of construction. Diverting the modernist grid by referring to aspects of textile history suggests a more flexible and inclusive scope of influence, context, and interpretation.
Ridå
1998
Textile work as stage curtain for the main auditorium of Moderna Museet Stockholm
Public commission: Statens Konstråd, Stockholm
Cotton velvet, 4,6 x 17 m
Velvet is a textile that is often used for stage curtains. In connection with ideas about the visible and the hidden and the terms “on stage”, “backstage”, "behind the scene", I became aware of the interplay between the velvet fabric’s contrasting properties: the front side’s dense, shiny pile, and the reverse side’s smooth, matte surface and paler appearance. In this work, the ordinarily reverse and hidden side of the velvet fabric is given a prominent position. This ‘other side’ of the moss green velvet is exposed as two paler green, asymmetrically placed vertical stripes. The width of the stage curtains stripes repeats the width of auditorium’s horizontal wooden paneling.
Containers
1994–1995
Installation - Painting
After the dense symbolism of the Major Arcana, I was interested in colour as a lighter, purer substance, unnamed other than as content. The interior of each Container consists of different combinations of monochrome planes. The reflected colour from these painted surfaces creates illusory and luminous spaces. A vertical opening in each Container controls physical access. The more open the Container is to physical entry the fainter the interior colour becomes. Peering into the most closed Container gives a dark and black impression. The remaining four Containers give impressions of glowing red, fluorescent green, blushing rose, and airy, evaporating pink.
22 Paintings : The Major Arcana
1991–1992
Twenty-two paintings, oil on canvas, 192 x 82 cm each
An image of two concentric circles: a small circle within a much larger. I laughed at the imaginative and humorous interpretation of the abstract-geometric image being a 'sleeping man with large sombrero'. The friction between the abstract and the representational, the self-referential and the symbolic-narrative called for closer inspection.
The symbols and allegories of the Tarot present a curious and compelling mix of the popular and the obscure.
The twenty-two trump cards and Major Arcana of the Tarot, numbered 0 – 21, can be interpreted as a pictorial procession of life’s significant events. Used for fortune telling, the Tarot is connected to occult divination and esoteric traditions such as the Kabbalah and numerology.
In my version of the Major Arcana I tried to achieve balance between contrasting principles and conflicting dogma.
My intention was to combine a formal, minimalist vocabulary with vivid colour, quasi-figurative elements and highly symbolical, metaphorical titles.