pile
2022

Both a publication that can be put together by the public and a live publishing workshop that was activated for four weeks as part of the exhibition I call it art at the National Museum in August 2022.

Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo) 2022
House of Foundation (Moss) 2022
Kiosken Studio (Bergen) 2024
Katalog for kunstnerisk publisering (online)

The work is a meditation upon physical prints, the past, the future, and artistic value.

During my stay at the museum, there was always something going on.

In addition to producing pile and overseeing the interactive installation of the work, there was an open day for the public to come in and print, and four additional artists' books were performatively produced live from my temporary "office" inside the museum. These publications were made by and in collaboration with other artists in the show: Petter Buhagen, Hanan Benammar, Kirsty Kross, and Niels Munk Plum.

If the public wished to obtain pile, they were asked to fill out this card:

  



  

  

Since moving to the country, I've been getting really into compost. The shapes and the colors, the quickly changing compositions and the radiating heat. Old and new are combined and recombined until they are suddenly something else entirely. Something rich, moist and monochromatic. The alchemy of soil.

Soil emerges from egg shells, garden weeds, stale bread, moldy crusts of cheese, fish bones, avocado pits, wood chips, wilting flowers, my children's half eaten plates of food, soggy black banana peels, and sad forgotten leftovers.

Artists' books, at their best, are a medium like no other. Piles of paper are transformed through repurposed obsolete office technology and the human hand into artworks in and of themselves. The container and content are one: accessible to both the creator and consumer. From seemingly nothing special emerges an affordable, intimate and tactile object that you can hold in your hands, stow away in your pocket or under an arm, and consume equally well in public or in utmost secrecy. What else is so portable and free, full of determination and vision, and mutable enough to both embrace and break conventions? Free of targeted advertisements and mindless scrolling, artists' books are a physical reminder of the vast, complex and sensual world from which they derive.

This artist book is a collection of new notes and images along with re-printed and re-mixed posters, texts, collages, printer spreads and images only previously available in small (out of print) editions. A chaotic compilation that is an open window, a reflection pool, and a bittersweet love letter to the passing of time.

Years later, by a young artist who had a summer job at the museum in 2022, I was told the installation felt like finding a hidden, hip indie bar.

My own reflections and notes (on performing being an artist in an extremely public place) were published in a zine. Entitled What should an artist look like? What should a practice feel like?, it was launched in connection to a residency and exhibition at Kiosken Studio (Bergen) in 2024 where pile rode again for a new audience.