#167 The Woods Painting

ARTIST STATEMENT My works are made of ordinary filler. It's a 5 mm thick layer surrounded by an oak frame. The filler cracks when it dries, and I make the cracks part of my expression. There is beauty in decay, and in imperfections. It recalls the physical forces of the world. Gravity and desintegration. Expansion and attraction. I like my work to be shaped by the properties of the material and by conceptual decisions, rather than any personal style. I want to say something about alienation. As individual subjects we perceive the world through images. Images are representations, they are different from reality in itself. Thus we experience ourselves as somehow retracted from reality, and this primordial sense of alienation shapes the human condition. By emphasizing the flatness of an image, and in the same time evoking the presence of the materials, I want to adress this lack, or longing, inherited in our perception of reality. My work also relates to other modes of alienation, like the subjects estrangement from her natural conditions, or from the society as a whole. Or cultural alienation in the wake of migration and refugee crises. I often work in response to inequality or injustice, to raise awareness and make a stand, but also as a way to deal with it on a personal level. I do art to focus on the things in the picture that are missing. To embrace the incompleteness of our understanding, but simultaneously contemplate what lies underneath. And I hope that is what others take away from it too.