Some kind of Metabolism
Exhibitiontext for the solo exhibtion Some kind of Metabolism
We live in a time where you can be everywhere at the same time and when time and narration stretch and bend. We hover between extremes and human’s increased need for stimulation is boosted in step with the increased flow of impressions and quick rewards. Despite this high-tech development, our bodies and brains still react operationally and emotionally instinctively. The volatile and the stable at the same time. Through playing, studying knowledge production, personal development and by using expectations and excitement, I explore the importance of physical understanding and a non-rational, multi-layered communication. It's about creating spatial dramas and to explore co-creative processes, as well as making myself sensitive to what I call everyday magic.
Isn’t it fantastic that we know so much about many things but rarely are we given special education in what actually lies between the rational and the emotional? I am interested in what happens when we stretch a shape and pull it out and transform it into something new, through feeling. What you feel may not be rational, but the feeling is right! Or? Will I maybe get an answer to my wonders if I look really long into the pancake on the stove? Will I maybe understand else something through squeezing the dough between my fingers?
In a way, this exhibition is aimed at a kind of piercing of our culture, what constitutes our culture. To be a body in a body, in an expectation, in a context. About what it's like to be a woman, mother and artist. To eat or to be eaten. The poet and author Ann Carson explained this about form so well in an interview * where she points to the Greek word morphé. She says: “Each idea has a certain shape, and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphē it was to me just the right word for that. Unlike ‘shape’ in English which falls a bit short, morphē in Greek means the ... plastic contours that an idea has inside all your senses when you grasp it the first moment, and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. I can’t start writing something down until I get a sense of that – that morphē. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.”
I recognize Ann Carson's description so well in my pursuit of the work I do. How my sculptures, images and installations are created to show precisely this mobility within their own moving, set, contours. And are maybe the contours also set up by each viewer? For while every human being is a morph (form), we are irrevocably also part of a larger form, the shape of our world.
We should take care of the unexplainable, that which hard to list, or directly explain. Because just how selections streamlines in line with the fact that more and more spaces are being commercialized, am I afraid that we are depleting the earth in the same way as we are depleting our own creative intelligence and our capacity for humanity. If we are not careful, we will erode the multicultural and important bacterial floras needed to rebuild the body's defense against harmful attacks. We should be afraid of the cycle in which we operate and embrace the multifaceted and ambivalent.
Åsa Cederqvist, October 2018
* Anne Carson, interview by Michael Silverblatt, in Bookworm, National Public Radio, via KCRW, August 7, 1997, accessed May 17, 2011, http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/bookworm/anne-carson-2