Installation: 8 platforms, each 240 × 120 × 74 cm, plywood. Materials and components: Steel, painted wood, MDF lettering, light boxes 80 × 120 × 6 cm, UV-protective glass, magnets. Rag paper 80 × 125 cm and 60 × 50 cm, some crumpled and pressed flat, some with photogravure, blind embossing, text and drawing. Photography Inkjet prints, approx. 33 × 49 cm and 40 × 60 cm.
Practical assistance Jacob Klöcker Petersen and Selma Daǧdeviren.
The production of the work is supported by The Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation, The Beckett-Foundation and The Danish Art Workshops. Photo credit: Jan Søndergaard
The exhibition presents Signe Guttormsen’s work with rag paper and photography. It is the first comprehensive presentation of the project Cirkulær Magi (Circular Magic), in which the artist uses discarded clothing worn by family and friends to make paper.
Guttormsen draws on an almost forgotten part of European art history, in which paper was made from used textiles for centuries and used as a support for art, printmaking and writing. Clothing that people had lived in and experienced the world through thus became the basis for new images and stories. In Circular Magic, this connection between lived life, material and image is explored through a circular process.
The paper bears traces of its own making and, like photography, points to the context and reality from which it emerges. In the translation into an image, reality is transformed into a code.
On the upper floor of Kongegaarden, the works unfold as a spatial installation in which specially designed platforms and frames become an integral part of the encounter between materials, images and space. The installation explores how we see and understand the world through the media and materials that connect us to it.
