Utom sig/ Beside oneself - Galleri Alva, Umeå Sept-Oct 2023
Exhibition statement:
“These works come out of a period of experimentation, with attempts to give concrete expression to something about the relation/boundaries/exchanges between the self and what lies outside.
To be ‘beside oneself’ describes a highly emotional state (like grief, joy, anger or excitement) where it seems the emotions can not be contained within the body or the self. I’m interested both in the expression and the phychological tactic. To ‘lose oneself’, leave one's 'center' - to let go, to be completely ‘swallowed up’ by something, and conversely to step out of oneself- to truly empathise, to try to look at oneself and one's work from the outside.
This exhibition is part of a larger project where I enter into dialogue with the outsider artist Aloïse Corbaz (Switzerland 1886-1964). Corbaz suffered from schizophrenia and worked from inside a mental asylum, mostly using pastel on paper. She described her pictures as reflections from a sun shining on a colorful universe. In her descriptions of her practice, the inner world is absolute – it is the inner characters that are the driving force. Her practice is of a documenting kind, where she is a kind of automata that registers and copies what is already present and clear to her.
The idea that madness and creativity are linked has perhaps to do with a necessary split of the self, a split that is fruitful for finding new angles but which can sometimes seem to balance dangerously close to insanity. In my practice, the fields of tension between surface/form and reality/fantasy become useful tools to grasp something about this.”