Urge for creating and getting rid of thoughts that get overloaded in my head to give myself rest, peace in mind and self stimulance when getting those thoughts out in the visual. Showing what I am but at the same time understanding who you are. It is all I have done and all I can do. I have never been employed and I don’t think I could be either.
2 What do you intend your work to convey to an audience?
I am making stories about characters with abstract intentions. It is a mixture of sadness, humour, insanity and longing. It is put together so the audience don’t get a clear idea, but overall it is all giving some calm and esthetical scenario with confusion given by those characters created.
3 Why do you work in your chosen medium and format?
I work in all medias and formats that could suit my projects intention. When it comes to 3 dimensional works I have mostly been working in organic materials. Materials that have been a part of something alive and now is dead. It has grown on life and every piece of material is one of a kind. So that is my fascination for threes and animal skins. I use Video to make my scenarios and characters into reality, something that did actually happen. Paintings and drawings will always be a 2 dimensional depiction of something, which I also like, an image from within myself even its elements can be taken from my surroundings. Making a video I record in a real setting makes the same artificial depicted scenarios into a reality. I also draw and perform. In the end I put it all together into one big installed scenario in a space that tells one story in many medias or many levels of artificialness or realities
4 Technically speaking how do you go about constructing your work, that is the image or object itself? What devices do you employ?
With animals I pick them up from the road and skin them, tan the skin and make objects out of the hides, as recycling, I also by skins from hunters and I get donated dead animals. Anyway…the way I work is so varied, so from each project I apply a new technique and use new medias that I find suitable. So it is almost impossible to go into specifics. With Painting I use Spray-paint on murals, Oil on large canvases and enamels on small-scale boards. They are built up composed and constructed straight on the surface without knowing how the composition and how the final result are going to be. It is a way of working that makes each image fresh and keeps my images varied giving me new impulses and also becomes good start-ups for further thinking in other medias.
5 Which period(s)/artists/specific works of art are you influenced by and how directly? How does this manifest in your work?
I am not especially influenced by art. Of course there are certain elements in peoples work I like.
Examples would be: The freedom, simplicity and playfulness in Karen Kilimniks paintings, the mood of Picassos rose period and the anarchic concepts of Andreas Hoofer’s work. I also admire people like Terry Richardson who looks like my dead dad, but most of my influences comes from fallen loners as Ian Curtis to Arthur Rimbaud, both famous and those who never got any followers believing in what they did but died miserable and confused. I also admire Varg Vikernes who is in jail for torching several churches and stabbing an other black metal icon in Norway to death. He sits 21 years in jail for doing what he believes in, having whole of Norway despising him. He now release melancholic ambient music from jail and writes nazi poetry and nationalistic books. I don’t agree with everything he does but I certainly admire his fight.
I focus on those people and this outsider culture as rednecks, hermits, and people creating their own world in loneliness without having any other intention than fulfilling their own world. Not doing it for fame and money. Just the simple reason that the world would not be livable without the build-up of their own surroundings and the real world does not matter. As you would spot some weird redneck performing a ritual for himself in the forest in the middle of the night.
6 What stimulates/informs your work from the world around you?
Stories I hear, random images and silent places I find connected to stuff as I said in the last question
7 What stimulates/informs your work from your own personal experience?
People I have lost and the person I am. I like being isolated and creating films, objects and paintings I can interact with on my own. I create tales about individuals mostly acted out by myself as rituals being or becoming other characters. The search for someone else that mostly ends in failure.
I have since I was a kid lost many close family members and friends and had fantasies since I was a kid to take journeys to the underworld (as I started calling it) and finding those people. Especially my dad, and bringing them back. So that’s my fascination of taxidermy. Taking something dead and creating some artificial life, as an artificial resurrection. Again the Idea of hunting really fascinates me. Killing your favourite animal and then again resurrecting it for your own personal love it in pure egoistic and esthetical ways. I find that really bizarre. Most of my family are hunter’s taxidermists and butchers so I am lucky to have the right people around me. Taking my families and old traditions in general into my own generation mixed with the culture I grew up with.
8 From where do you derive your other visual source material (i.e. non art historical) and how do you implement this material within your work?
It can be anything with a certain feel. Best way I can describe it is: anonymous characters in strange settings with certain calmness but again there are signs of frustration and sadness.
I like images and stories without identities. Found images, random photos on the Internet, photos I find and get from antique stores, e-bay and the tip. I collect folklore, tales and old photos from archives in small towns here in Norway. I also like photographing scenarios from VHS B-Films of the TV. I use parts; elements and the feel of those pictures to both create my own scenarios based on those unknown characters. And I make stories that tell a tale about my created character or scenario created and the setting around it. I am also attracted to gore, 80’s muscle action films like Schwarzenegger, VanDamme and those action flicks Patrick Swayze did. More or less stuff like that.
9 What are the main problems that you face in making your work?
One is that I work in all medias so I don’t become a big expert in any of them. I know shitloads of techniques and ways of working and making things. But sometimes I wish I could just do one and become some old-time master of that one technique, such as oil painting. But there are to many things I need to do before I can think like that.
10 Where do you intend to take your work from here?
I want to paint more and become better with technical parts of the medium and preserving paintings. I will also continue making films and collect animal skins. I am trying to get to Mongolia to find the king of all sheep (The Ovis Ammon Ammon or the Altai Argali) and hopefully get one of them. My only problem is that I don’t kill animals. Guess that could be the answer for your previous question also. But yea, more painting, more tales about lonely pagan rednecks, Titans and red dress fortresses, more animal resurective objects and creating scenarios in spaces I get offered.