PORTAL, 2009-2020

NESTED IMAGES

Portal is a series of about 55 works on paper (collage and watercolor) in various sizes, made over an eleven year period. Five works were exhibited at Kösk in 2020 (see interview below) - the rest are yet to be exhibited, though many are sold.

The series takes its cue from illustrated covers of books and films. More specifically, illustrations in which the story´s characters, landscapes, objects and events blend together in the picture plane, superimposing them. Such cover illustrations are often a visual break-down of the story into an amalgam of the story´s key aspects, And just like in dreams, space, time and people become fluid and scalable, emphasising the personal experience and quest of its protagonist(s).

An often used tool in this regard is that of silhouettes and nested images within them - such as the silhouette of a person with a landscape within.

My interest in these visual conventions prompted me to look for an illustrated storybook I could process in a similar way. The source book became an illustrated bible for children, as it contained a myriad of pictures done in a homogenous style. The objective was to have the book undergo a dreamlike processing, disregarding the written stories and focusing instead on the images themselves, their colors and shapes - invoking the visual power it may have on its audience (children).

As the source book was executed in watercolor, I decided to paint additional watercolor elements in the same hues. These were cut and pasted along with the original source images, attempting to make the watercolor medium a visual protagonist of its own, diffusing the border between them..

The finished compositions show layers of images within images. The domain of a nested image can be clear or diffuse, each image a separate world or moment. Some objects escape the boundary of a silhouette, moving into new images as in a portal.

Three residencies were offered to me during this work: Krabbesholm Højskole in Skive, Denmark (2009), Nordisk Kunstnersenter in Dale, Sunnfjord (2009-2010), and at the W17 Residency Program at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo (2011-2012). They were finally concluded during the pandemic lockdown.