Forgotten and Saved
“Forgotten and Saved” (210 x 180 cm)
Materials: Furniture, lost notes, trash, bones, dried plants, coffee, acrylic paint and newspaper
Graduation art-piece from Visuel HF (2023)
The installation shows a recognizable grandmother living-room corner, though something strange is afoot.
Through the art-theory Das Unheimliche is the grandmother corner able to invoke a strange feeling.
Instead of family photos, there’s lost grocery lists, notes and pictures of strangers in the album.
There’s bones from animals, chopped off hen wings and feet, and dried plants everywhere in the escritoire.
The shelves decorated with rusty things, pieces of porcelain, and other things picked up from the sidewalk.
And on the every wall there’s a framed picture showing a completely different youngster life.
Grandmothers corner is filled with things that don’t normally fit, but it’s also a hiding place for things that is put aside and forgotten by others. She puts everything on display that normally don’t have a place in a living room.
This art-piece wants to start a debate about our relationship to trash and the ugly things, when something is deemed useless and unworthy – and why it can’t be seen the same way that normal decoration or be as much meaningful as family photos.
Photo album
Anti-scrap reliefs
Building
Idea making
This installation took 4 weeks to complete, all from idea to finished product.
There were many personal objects from my collections used for this this Graduation project;
The photo album – which had lost grocery lists, notes, pictures etc. – everything was collected within the last half school year, and a lot of it had been found on trips to Rema 1000, Føtex or on the way to school.
Anti-scrap reliefs – which were made up of pictures from a youthful life – all of them were taken through out my education years on Visual HF, both taken at the school, college and also generally in Viborg.
The escritoire – where every room was filled with animal bones, both from my own collection and borrowed from friends, hen wings and feet, and everything nice from nature, dried and put in the furniture to molder.
There has always been a fascination for everything that is deemed ugly, gross and useless, so it was obvious to make the piece show off all of these elements to the viewer, and therefore begin a debate.
It was clear from the start, that this project needed to be anti-beautiful. It needed to have a sort of edge but still feel welcoming, chill and cozy.
It was here that the idea about it being a “Grandmother corner” popped up, a grandmothers living room is something that puts everyone at ease and is something everyone recognizes.
The grandmother environment would also harmonize well with all the different collections, because it’s always part of a grandmothers living room to be decorated from top to bottom with all that she has collected through out her life.
The escritoire showed to be quite a bump on the way with the graduation project, as well as how the trash needed to be framed to be shown off as being more than just “trash” for the viewer.
The escritoire and its many bones and nature went through many drafts before it became a proper finished product, this can be seen in “Idea making” picture-slider.
It was meant to, at the start, to be filled with moddels of dead animals and/or pictures of road-kills – this idea was put on the shelf rather quickly since there weren’t enough time to make the moddels – there were however enough bones to decorate the furniture just as well thankfully.
The trash weren’t nearly as hard to figure out, there just needed to be worked out an idea to make the viewer have the same feelings about the trash as they would’ve with grandmothers porcelain figurines at home on the dresser. It was here the idea of the similarities that needed to be made between the two; that everything a grandmother has in her collection, has a story behind it. And that was the key element, so just like the porcelain figurines, the trash needed to have their stories written down to the viewer so they could convey the same kind of relationship one can have with normal decoration.
Thank you to my dad for bringing materials to build the walls <3