15/07/2022
Artist Statement
My work is a cathartic auto ethnographic study of identity within cultural experience and cross-cultural experience. A look into why it matters and what can be gathered when looking into one’s own cultural experience.
I am a cultural orphan, someone who has left their cultural background at a young age, to grow up in a cultural background unknown to them. Some individuals simulate quite well to a different culture and sometimes there will be a distance that develops either between the mother culture or distance that develops between the new excepted culture and you. This is my experience. The distance for me was between my mother culture. I never felt connected to my mother culture. On family visits to relatives as a kid, I often felt quite at a distance from my cousins. They all spoke fluent English and fluent Norwegian, while I could only speak English and a little bit of Norwegian. My vessels and compositions are an attempt to reconnect with my mother culture. Grasping for cultural memories that I don’t know if I have anymore or whether I ever had.
All of these pieces are made with the principles of formalism in mind, weight, shape, balance and form. Formalism allows for the vessel to speak for itself. Deviating from formalism I’ve created deviant forms, vessels that have been cut or changed to question some of these principles of formalism. The reasoning for this is to create differing identities within my work. My cultural orphans.
