FAKE OLD, PRIMITIVE NEW
Online Degree Exhibition 2020, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design.
(Mixed-media sculptures.Carved linden wood, asphalt metal and other materials.)
The human body can be seen as something abstract that isn’t yet fully explored, a cognitive, biological and material container of the unknown – opposed to our tools that are intentionally designed with a purpose and with a deliberate and fully-known composition to fill our needs.
But the boundary between the body and the tool have never been clear. Tools instead grow outwards from and integrate with our bodies. They are part of the unknown too, a part of us that cannot be fully understood.
Through archaeology, we interact with material traces of ourselves from the far horizon of known human contexts, where artefacts or sites appear in fragments.
To likewise see the present link between body and environment as something not fully known, to see a tool that I’m using or have created as something familiar, a part of me and my own body but at the same time as something obscure or even alien-like, creates an ambiguous contradiction, something uncanny, a reversed phantom ‘pain’.