EASY LIVING

The title of the project relates to an essential part of modern life, which is about the process of accumulating stuff and how to deal with the de-manifesting of objects. The point of departure for this project is an internal and mental exploration.

The project has revitalized my relationship to hot glass as an artistic medium. Sculptural hot glass has for many years been my preferred material for realizing expressive abstract visions. Sculptured hot glass is a form of ultimate process. From the first gather to the last heating, the interaction between the artistic vision and the specific materiality of glass. It is somehow like stepping into an emotive rather than a thinking zone, one that exists beyond time and place. The latest inspired manipulation leads to the next.

Previously I have worked according to the dogma that a piece should be created in one cohesive course. But after a residency in Berlin where I learned pick up techniques, I have initiated a new way of connecting details from earlier works and integrating old ideas into new correlations.

By literally destroying old pieces with a hammer and assembling fragments anew, I have allowed what was to become more. A general refinement is taking place by letting individual parts and ideas become a gathered mass. Emotions become things and things become emotions. It is a paraphrase over the notion of aimed peace and harmony by the process of cleaning up all that makes up a thing: intentionality, passing of time, sensations, relations. All this gathered thing-ness goes through a transformation as a collective pile that ends up being individual pieces yet again.

Nowadays glass as artistic medium almost has a kind of archaic placement in the hierarchy of the art world, caught between function and aesthetics. Instead of choosing either or one can go with the archaic. By reusing old material in the light of earlier attempts the process of glass-making reveals itself as being able to generate a vast span of sculpturing; both in physical form and as a transformative procedure.