ARTIST STATEMENT

As an artist, I think of myself as an explorer. I reflect on different ways of constructing an artwork, striving to understand how the final work is formed. Through the process of art making I am also trying to comprehend and analyze the world in my own way. My artistic production consists of photographs, intallations and paintings. Formerly I worked mainly with oil paintings, but in the last few years I have become more and more fascinated by the possibilities of combining photography and painting, and therefore that has become the natural focus of my work.

Technically my works are photography based pigment prints on paper, that I have continued to work on by drawing and painting, as well as crumpling the paper. Finally, I photograph and print this reconstructed object and once again draw on the final print. In many of the pictures I myself am the model. I find it important to be a part of the artwork not just as an artist but as well as an object. These various stages of working form layers of depth and time. The photograph itself brings a conceptual and temporal dimension. The last layer is formed when the complete artwork meets life and the viewer.

The crumpling, painting and rephotographing highlight the difference of equipment with relation to presenting: what happens when the picture is viewed as a painting or when it's viewed as a photograph. A passed moment has been captured in a photograph while painting emphasizes the present. By painting the photographs I wanted to create tension between paint and the object pictured. The colour and the handmade traces on the works refer to a bodily experience, that has been brought to the picture because a photograph in itself, in my opinion, cannot capture the experience of the body. I want my works to be conseptual and significant without compromising aesthetics.

I have photographed ordinary life. Captured real and staged situations. I have used old pictures of my grandparents, current media imagery and art history as a source, and as a source of inspiration. In art history, I find especially interesting the way we see the world through pictures and how we perceive reality through them.

Essential themes in my work are the forming of identitety, the feeling of extarnality and the limbo that comes with that. I reflect on humane fears and traumas that make one become an outsider and cause one to isolate oneself. My art is a statement in behalf of humanity. I do not aim to show a right or wrong way to be, but to consider these options.

This is my way of processing abstract being in the world. This is the thread that I cling to, and make into art, a start from which I begin to demolish and build my own part in this complex reality. As an artist I am a storyteller, telling little everyday stories, that open up if only you find a quiet moment to spend among them.