My artistic practice
A lifelong practice of paying attention
"I don't make art about hands. I use hands as a lens though which I explore life."
I have always been drawn to the details
that easily escape our attention: a gesture, an everyday object, a fleeting moment or the small acts through which we care for one another. As a child, I noticed things that others might overlook, and I still find myself drawn to the ordinary. Perhaps because most of our lives are lived there. Not in the extraordinary moments we plan and celebrate, but in the everyday: in the kitchen, around the table, on our way somewhere, in the things we hold and the gestures we repeat.
Hands have become a powerful language for exploring this. They create, hold, protect, care, reach out and let go. By focusing on hands rather than faces, I move away from the story of a particular person and towards something more universal. The hand becomes a point of recognition, allowing the viewer to bring their own experiences, relationships and memories into the work.
Since discovering textile as my medium in 2021,
I have worked full-time and intensely to explore what fabric, colour and thread can do. I am drawn to the physicality and slowness of the medium. Thread becomes my line, fabric my surface, while colour and glitter bring energy, joy and a sense of abundance. I deliberately embrace these qualities because I believe the world does not need more grey. For me, beauty, playfulness and joy have a rightful place in contemporary art.
At the heart of my practice is a question that I return to again and again: How can we be fully present in the one life we have been given?
This question is closely connected
to what I call livskærlighed, my deep love of life itself. I don't mean constant happiness or positivity. Life can be painful, imperfect and unpredictable, and we can still choose to meet it with curiosity, openness and gratitude. I don't believe in perfection. I believe in the perfectly imperfect human being, and in the importance of embracing what is already there rather than constantly striving to become something more.
For me, making art is therefore an exercise
in paying attention. I don't want to tell people how to live, nor do I want to give them answers. I want to create a moment in which they stop and notice something: a gesture, a colour, a familiar object, a memory or perhaps simply the feeling of being present.
If a work of mine can do that, even for a moment, it has already begun to live beyond me.
Because sometimes art does not need to change the world.
Sometimes it is enough to change a moment.
To find my designwork, christmass calenders, books of love and alle the other stuff I do pleace visit www.altdetimellem.dk (in danish)