How do you describe your own art practice?
My art starts with an investigation of the world I’m living. I dig into contemporary society, our common history and my own situation as an artist living in Norway. I try to comment what I see and what I think is important. In all my work, I try to have an inner core of conscience for the community I live in. Most of the time it ends up three-dimensional. I guess it is because it requires its own space in the room and thus becomes more difficult to overlook. Art is about communication and I think it is good that art requires space. For me it works best like that. It is also about my need to work physically.
What was your first experience with art?
I guess art has always been part of my world. My parents exposed me to art from I was quite small. However, it was with Jean Tinguely’s breath taking exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1986 the idea that art is something I want to do began to take form. I still hang on to the post card I bought at the exhibition 30 years ago with an image of Tinguely’s crazy installations. To be a child and run around in an exhibition full of noise and all the wildest mowing machines you could imagine had a deep impact on me.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
It comes from many different sources. It is from relevant issues in media, books, movies and of course my experiences of being me.
What do you need in order to create your work?
I rely on my studio. I have built it up as my private artist’s laboratory. When I go to the studio, everything is about art. I am pretty good at turning off the art world as I step out of my laboratory. However, it is the impulse and the community around me that triggers me, but it is at the studio it happens.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I am finishing sculptures that Gallery Brandstrup is going to exhibit at the Armory Show in New York. In addition, I work on several exhibitions. The first is showing at Gallery Hans Alf in Copenhagen in September. I also have two public works I am working on.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
I think I have to go to the world of books. On my way to Beijing, I picked up a Cormac McCarthy novel at the airport. It was Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. I have read some of his novels before but this! It really got me. The darkness of human history is so evil that it almost unbelievable how we still are able to populate the world. It is fiction but baste on real happenings that took place round year 1850, it describe the massacres of the Native Americans.
