Excerpts from catalogue – text by Karen Lisa Salomon
“It’s a basic thing to squeeze something to get power over it and to use it. Just squeeze…”, explains Martha Hjorth Jessen, and thus sets the slightly eerie tone that can also be sensed in her installation. “The work is based on my oldest and most powerful nightmare and I have done this in a therapeutic attempt to ally myself with my own anxiety, and through play and system to place the ‘monster’ outside of myself, so I can achieve a kind of image-cure of the nightmare.” The nightmare consists of a static image representing a fat hand squeezing and crushing a thin hand of long, slender bones. The bone theme and the hands are reflected in the artwork’s “handprint negatives”, pressed by hand in skin-colored Fimo clay. The result evokes images of fossilized bones or crumbling vertebrae from the spine of a strange species, systematically and sequentially ordered on a shelf. “The shelf is as a repository for storing anything you no longer need, and which can be put away,” explains Hjorth Jessen. The shelf’s archive of varied but repetitive forms, also reflects the hopelessness of the nightmare’s eternal recurrence, which is represented through the sequentiallity of the presentation. The wooden shelf is dark and the small, sculpted “hand imprints” are in bright colors of various skin or bone-colored variants. This triggers an interplay between positive and negative, dark and light, where the artist’s own hand functions as the positive, whereas its imprint in the clay acts as a negative. This negative does not appear in opposition or contrast to the hand as an acting, physical appearance, but evokes a completely different and alien embodiment. This other embodiment appears as an undecipherable strangeness. As Morse signals in a sequence, in a completely foreign language and with a strange annotation. In its distortion of the close and familiar body, the alienated secretion from the artist’s own body now appears as monstrous and ambiguous. It is a quest into the imprint of the hand; which is where art comes from, and from where energy is transferred to things”.
Unlock Untie Untangle
Excerpts from catalogue – text by Karen Lisa Salomon
“It’s a basic thing to squeeze something to get power over it and to use it. Just squeeze…”, explains Martha Hjorth Jessen, and thus sets the slightly eerie tone that can also be sensed in her installation. “The work is based on my oldest and most powerful nightmare and I have done this in a therapeutic attempt to ally myself with my own anxiety, and through play and system to place the ‘monster’ outside of myself, so I can achieve a kind of image-cure of the nightmare.” The nightmare consists of a static image representing a fat hand squeezing and crushing a thin hand of long, slender bones. The bone theme and the hands are reflected in the artwork’s “handprint negatives”, pressed by hand in skin-colored Fimo clay. The result evokes images of fossilized bones or crumbling vertebrae from the spine of a strange species, systematically and sequentially ordered on a shelf. “The shelf is as a repository for storing anything you no longer need, and which can be put away,” explains Hjorth Jessen. The shelf’s archive of varied but repetitive forms, also reflects the hopelessness of the nightmare’s eternal recurrence, which is represented through the sequentiallity of the presentation. The wooden shelf is dark and the small, sculpted “hand imprints” are in bright colors of various skin or bone-colored variants. This triggers an interplay between positive and negative, dark and light, where the artist’s own hand functions as the positive, whereas its imprint in the clay acts as a negative. This negative does not appear in opposition or contrast to the hand as an acting, physical appearance, but evokes a completely different and alien embodiment. This other embodiment appears as an undecipherable strangeness. As Morse signals in a sequence, in a completely foreign language and with a strange annotation. In its distortion of the close and familiar body, the alienated secretion from the artist’s own body now appears as monstrous and ambiguous. It is a quest into the imprint of the hand; which is where art comes from, and from where energy is transferred to things”.