Now we are finished. Thanks to everyone. We’ll meet again, I guess.

The basic theme still being the one of light and darkness, we have during this very last week been working with constellations of words and images; reading aloud the runes of Kalevala in the morning, listening to the tale of virgin Marjatta… where pagan and Christian motifs together form a Heraclitian bow.

In this further processing, we make use also of graphic techniques: dry etching on plastic sheets and printing from linoleum and wood cuts.

The suggestion has been to find images originating from one’s own reception of passages in the text, though not necessarily illustrative; to find out ways to benefit from the printing process itself; and to make a choice of at least five pictures with some kind of inner coherence – to which the students have answered in an excellent manner.

students’ prints

early Monday morning… some of the students have been working in the atelier during the weekend. Fire is lit in the stove, and morning still dark. Prints spread across the floor. Soon we’ll begin the day together by reading from Kalevala.

To be continued…

Here are a few photos from the Kristofferus church, where some of the black-and-white drawings can be seen for the weeks to come. Twelve gold plated squares, crafted by Sigrid Winkler, were hung above eyelevel on the curved inner wall of the foyer. The sequence was echoed in a series of small drawings, arranged in groups of five or six and forming a rhythmized horizon lower down along the extension of the same wall. Yet another sequence of larger pictures mirrored that imaginary line from the flat opposite wall.

The material transforms into a theme – one out of the many inherent – answering to a specific site in time and space.

‘The Battlefield’ by Käthe Kollwitz

From Tuesday to Friday, the students have been into an intense working process, grasping the complexity of the theme. The starting point was from a few pictures by Käthe Kollwitz – like The Battlefield – and the question: how could the dramaturgy be brought from the world of human emotions shown in Kollwitz’ works, into the quiet life of everyday things surrounding us?

To prepare for this, we have been looking together upon the elementaries in those pictures, such as: what happens when the surface is more high than broad? more broad than high? Where is the horizon to be found – and what is it, really? How does the choice of proportions and horizon work in the picture? How does it affect the viewer?

From the students’ own works we followed the theme of negative forms through a series of transformations.

On Friday, after three days’ work, we had a material to put on display in the foyer of the Kristofferus church by Saltå, Järna, together with works from Sigrid Winkler. I’ll return to that…

students’ drawings