Artist in residence at O', June 2008


Experiences other than visual are the most sensual carriers of personal history. Sense of touch, whether imagined or real, is a potent memory trigger along with smells we remember. Sense of space - confined or expansive, safe or unsettling - is a physically felt experience related to architectural context. I combine these memory triggers and architectural references in my installations to make the intent of the piece “universally personal”. I am interested in the state of mind represented and enveloped by my installatons.
When an installation works well, the lines between the viewer’s presence and their presence of mind become blurred. Through the context of the viewer’s personal history, the universal frame of reference is transformed into an evocative personal segment of present memory. Regardless of medium I continuously explore ideas from, or for, sculptural work. Drawings are an integral part of my working process. I draw and sketch in pencil, string, thread, or any mark making tool on paper. Drawing, and my small scale works serve similar purposes. They explore on a intimate scale the various implications of my ideas large, or small.
Involving the locale in the making of a work is integral to my current body of work. I explore the sources available in a particular place: Landscape, architecture, history, detritus of culture, recurring visuals in the surroundings, and the installation site itself. Breaking apart the visual information available I distill it into its parts, from which I select the details that most poignantly reveal a connectedness. By bringing details or substructures to the front, a visual role reversal happens. The former anonymous detail becomes the visual and sensory focus of the viewer’s experience. My continued exploration of location is in part based in the desire to find footing in any one location I find myself in. Being Danish, but having spent the main part of my adult life in the States when not traveling, may be the root of my current investigation.
I use my unique frame of reference, and affinity for material history, to inspire a more universal reference for the viewer to translate through their own material memory.
Line Bruntse. 2008.