History
“You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.”
Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party
Hygge/Unhygge
Collaboration with Nell Whitney
Hygge — “an art of creating intimacy”
This piece was comprised of drawing elements with graphite and ink on vellum and paper. Projected onto the wall drawings was a film made by Nell Whitney. This film, which was shot and produced in Denmark, consisted of imagery of hygge and unhygge…the contrast of the moments in our lives.
The venue was filter 4, in Basel, Switzerland. filter4 is a former slow filter system on the Bruderholz, which was built by the architects Vischer & Fueter in the years 1903-1905. A large part of Basel’s households were supplied with drinking water from here. The facility is 1600 m² in size and consists of two chambers of 800 m² each. The facility was closed in 2006 because the city of Basel uses less water. The chambers are thick cement walls, and the floor is sand for the filtration of the water.
This place, one which provided water to thousands, yet was unconventional and challenging for the presentation of art, was a fitting one for the exhibition of this work its theme of comfort and discomfort, inside/outside, and trauma and relief.
Uittreksel
A collaboration with Angelika Steiger
The origin of our collaboration is a book. A Dutch 19th C hymnal. Angie and I each took a half…of the cover and the pages. If microgravity is the condition in which people or objects appear to be weightless, our self-assigned task was to transform the pages of this book, delve into the spiritual nature and history of the book’s contents, and perhaps reference these elements in a new, more personal, way.
Manipulating the poetry and the power of the divine, perhaps an act of rebellion or even sacrilege, and changing the pages into individual objects has given the words new meaning and the pages a new perspective.
Using the pages as a source – unlocking and extracting – translating and editing became a meditative process. The objectification of the spirituality that the book possessed became a functional realization of repurposing the words. By making each page a monument, and deciding which words to highlight, a new language was produced, one that neither related to the original language, nor to the original intent of the book.