Having plenty of time of my hands for the moment, i often do long walks with Arion, my dog, in the forest where i live. I sometimes spot roots and bits of wood on the path, with interresting twists and curves. It reminds me of the monster work i did with Renee this summer. There are shapes and creatues hiding in the wooden pieces. I also got inspiration from a driftwood artist Osamu Hirihara.
I like to combine these 3d monsters with objects of sentiment, to turn them into pieces that are precious to me, as they end up holding my memories.
“To properly encode a memory, you must first be paying attention. Since you cannot pay attention to everything all the time, most of what you encounter every day is simply filtered out, and only a few stimuli pass into your conscious awareness. If you remembered every single thing that you noticed, your memory would be full before you even left the house in the morning.” – Richard C. Mohs, PhD, How human memory works
African horse with yellow austrian memory
I found a little juniper twig that looked a bit like a horse. Somehow it made me think of these earrings i got as a travel present from my friend Sandra. Lovers of the good life, she and her husband Kevin spent 2014/15 traveling the world. Stavanger felt more empty without my Sandra around, the curly redhead that talks on in and out breath. One day i got a small package in the post, from South Africa. Sandra had wandered around a market and found these enormous earrings. “I just thought of you when i saw these” she wrote in the letter. Had I a been an ebony black African beauty, I could see what she meant. But my northern European paleness and broad neck doesn’t quite hold this giant pair, and I have never worn them. However, by adding them to my juniper wood horse, they get the appreciation i felt, upon receiving this little bit of love from my distant friend on the other side of the world.
Juniper smells amazing and sweet when it’s sanded by the way.
The little natural twig hole in the little horse needed to have something yellow that let the light through. Luckily i had one earring left, from a pair that i bought whilst traveling to Elisabeth and Andrews wedding in a small village in Austria, Reith im Alpbachtal. It seems like there is an old town square for every mile of land in this long valley shared with the old city of Innsbruck. Wandering through one of these medieval beauties, I came across a small jewellery shop with these yellow stones shining towards me. I remember that the summer evening was warm. I also remember having just drunk a cold glass of white wine with OP, that left that heavy feeling in my arms, making the aching beauty and of this being not an object to admire, but a place, in time, with an inevitable end to it, easier to bear.
“When you look at beauty, you are reminded of a horrible truth, namely, that it all decays and is lost. Beauty is something precious, and the more beautiful something is, the more painful it is to consider that it will decay, and the more beauty pains us, the higher we love the world, and the higher we love the world, the sadder it is that is is like fine grained sand running through our fingers, or is blown away by the wind, or washed away by the rain.”
– Loius de Bernieres, Birds without wings. page 36.
Blue eyed shark
I loved the base of this piece of wood. Voluptuous and curved. The top part was a bit broken. I sanded it down, getting into the unbroken pieces of the wood. And before my eyes, the piece had turned in to a shark, jumping out of the water, with his mouth open.
On the backside, sanding revealed a beautiful dark line in the wood, cutting through the light parts.
The blue eye turns the twig into the fish. This used to sit on an earring i bought whilst traveling in Brazil with my bestie Katrine from Norway/South Africa. Where was it? Fortaleza? I have a vague memory of a young boy selling them for next to nothing. Big white smile. We had traveled through a small part of this giant country on a dusty bus, following the lonely planet guidebook like it was salvation. Novice backpackers. I think we got to the point of just needing to be in one place for more than one day when we came across these.
The blue eye of the shark reminds me that Kat is always in my life, grounding, hilarious, lost and much stronger than a South African lioness.
Lil sister
This perfect little frame of wood that i found on a beach walk, had to contain something beautiful. Another piece of broken jewellery from my sister solved this problem. Being my twin, Siri never forgets the 5 min. head start she had on me at the start of our lives. The green earring i bought whilst traveling with the Waldens, just the three of us, in Choranche, France. David had discovered his base jumping paradise, Renee her sketch work french village heaven. I got to share two hot, french weeks with the super duo, and I think i bought these at the same time as David and i had run off from Renee, to select a birthday present for her, and stumbled across a tiny gift shop amongs the narrow, uneven streets. The blue beads frames these two memorabilias, and are from a huge indian necklace i got from my old flatmate Hema. I lived 2 years with Hema, in her small flat in Sheperds Bush, London. I remember her big, curly, black hair, her pearly laugh and total lack of confrontation fear. This piece holds all these 4 people.