TIME CAN WAIT
Extracts from the catalogue text from the exhibition 'Time can wait' by Maja Ingerslev
Even without text or image, a sheet of paper holds a story. Paper’s strong connotations to drawing, literature and narration cause the blank sheet to hold a certain narrative potential, like an untold story waiting to be brought to life – the papercuts unfold like drawings made with a scissor. In Time can wait white paper is an expressive medium in its own right and a carrier of its own stories in the interaction with various landscapes.
The sculptural papercuts awaken our curiosity; why are they there, in the middle of nature? Which strange power of growth has made them sprout? We recognise paper as (fragile) material, and the works open up to reflections on both growth and decomposition, emergence and disappearance.
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Paper is a natural product, and one can get the idea that the life cycle of the paper is brought to an end as this processed piece of nature is replaced in the landscape in the form of new, natural elements; leaves, twigs, melting snow, flowers, even grass made of paper. This action can be seen as a poetic gesture with its own inner logic, as a kind of repayment to Nature.
The installation inscribes itself into a land art-tradition with its site-specific works in nature, even though they are not made on site with found materials. Nature has been processed, wood fibres are turned into artistic papercuts and thus into cultural objects. Time can wait is not necessarily only about nature as such, but to a greater extent it is about how we relate to nature and how we choose to interact with it and represent it.
The works investigate abstract questions about themes such as transience of material things and change from a position between a microcosmos and a macrocosmos, between the imaginary and reality. The frail paper leaves exist in a world threatened by rain and wind, which in a more general way opens for contemplations about the conditions of human life and the processes of great importance to nature and to us, on a small and a large scale.
Full text:
TIME CAN WAIT
Time can wait is an installation consisting of a series of 18 photographs taken in Denmark, Italy and Iceland, and a video made in Denmark. In the photographs a world cut out in paper meets places and processes in the diverse nature of the three countries. In the video, the papercuts are put into motion in the encounter with the surrounding landscape. Each of the photographs presents a section of nature, large or small, isolated from the surroundings by the close cropping of the images. Time exists in the rest of the world, but in these sections of the world, time can wait.
Even without text or image, a sheet of paper holds a story. Paper’s strong connotations to drawing, literature and narration cause the blank sheet to hold a certain narrative potential, like an untold story waiting to be brought to life – the papercuts unfold like drawings made with a scissor. In Time can wait white paper is an expressive medium in its own right and a carrier of its own stories in the interaction with various landscapes.
The sculptural papercuts awaken our curiosity; why are they there, in the middle of nature? Which strange power of growth has made them sprout? We recognise paper as (fragile) material, and the works open up to reflections on both growth and decomposition, emergence and disappearance.
As viewers, we intellectually understand that there is the presence of an artist, a ‘cutting hand’, in the works. A neat, artistic processing of the paper has happened, and the papercuts have been carefully arranged in the 18 installations. Even so, this is overshadowed by the feeling that the organic papercuts grow on their own. The feeling that the artist is only present in the photographic documentation as a communicator and observer on equal terms with us, is profound.
In all photographs, the artistically crafted papercuts with their material fragility create an antithesis to the wild nature in which they appear, while they at the same time are in close dialogue with it. Sometimes they imitate various forms of nature, as if they try to blend in with the surroundings almost unnoticed, while in other works they add an extra element to the landscape and insist on their alterity.
The papercuts’ presence creates a contrast between our actual reality and the reality constituted by the papercuts in the landscapes in which they appear. Like two worlds meeting in each photograph. The meeting between these worlds contains a supernatural element - a transformation of reality occurs, as the papercuts move in and insist on their existence. This state between the real and the imaginary has an air of fairytale, a certain dreamlike atmosphere. A feeling that the world has temporarily come to a standstill is created in the pictures.
Along a foaming waterfall, a stream of paper seems to trickle across rocks and grass and past blue harebells. One percieves a sensuous contrast between the effervescent, ice cold water and the dry, rustling paper. And a contrast between the time-related movement inherent in the everflowing water, as opposed to the immobility of the paper stream. We know from experience that a waterfall moves, and it plainly shows in the picture
- time reveals its presence in the movement, even though it is frozen in the photographs. Time passes, when something moves, and time will inevitably mean the destruction of the papercuts. They are made of a material so frail that when the next storm comes, or the next rain shower falls, they will lose their original shape, dissolve, be destroyed. This vulnerability with regards to the processes of Nature seems to add a certain feeling of holding one’s breath to the pictures; the dense clouds are grey and they threathen with rain any moment. Even in the sunny sand dunes the weather is ever-changeable.
The papercuts reverberate like an echo of the beautiful and the fragile in Nature itself. The rugged and beautiful landscapes seem grand and imperishable compared to paper, but they are also subject to changeable and even destructive processes, both natural and man-made. The exhibition seems among other things to ask, how the diversity of nature has arisen, and how it is sustained or impoverished by these processes.
Paper is a natural product, and one can get the idea that the life cycle of the paper is brought to an end as this processed piece of nature is replaced in the landscape in the form of new, natural elements; leaves, twigs, melting snow, flowers, even grass made of paper. This action can be seen as a poetic gesture with its own inner logic, as a kind of repayment to Nature.
The installation inscribes itself into a land art-tradition with its site-specific works in nature, even though they are not made on site with found materials. Nature has been processed, wood fibres are turned into artistic papercuts and thus into cultural objects. Time can wait is not necessarily only about nature as such, but to a greater extent it is about how we relate to nature and how we choose to interact with it and represent it.
The works investigate abstract questions about themes such as transience of material things and change from a position between a microcosmos and a macrocosmos, between the imaginary and reality. The frail paper leaves exist in a world threathened by rain and wind, which in a more general way opens for contemplations about the conditions of human life and the processes of great importance to nature and to us, on a small and a large scale.
