This project is the next step of my thesis project Bloom. It was firstly exhibited as my first  Solo Show at Taf the Art Foundation in June 2019 and then later in October as a part of Platform Nord / Nordic Festival For Young Contemporary Art .This project aims to create a path between materials, the creative procedure of art and the artistic outcome. It focuses on the importance of this procedure and it is based on the multiple steps an artist has to take from one artwork to another. The question that remains is “when a material ever stops being a material and becomes an artwork and the opposite, when an artwork becomes material.
 
The main part of the project is the interaction of the audience with where a main sculpture is set in the gallery, surrounded by other smaller sculptures. The audience is called to place them as they want or make their own creation to place on  the big sculpture, in order to create a central art piece. Every afternoon for one week I was at the gallery space on the big table and called people to sit down and work with me. I showed them the  technique I use in order to create the ‘’grass’’ like effect and then they were allowed to use it as they wished. It’s an almost meditative process. In order to create only a small part of the sculpture hundreds of small pieces need to be cut and  clued next to each other one by one. Some people came feeling afraid they would destroy the main piece and they just glued one of the ready made pieces on to the sculpture.Others just enjoyed the process of cutting the ‘‘grass’’ pieces to leave for the next ones to use and sat for hours whilst big discussions emerged on the table. Others went ahead and made their own sculptures to add to the selection of the table and others worked directly on the big piece. There was even an occasion where someone came back the next day to finish what they had started the day before.


B L O O M in Progress

The Bloom project is a visual fairy tale, a collage between the perfect human body and the perfect vegetation. Based on botanical illustrations of the 17th and 18th century where the plants were visualized in their best possible state are combined with images of perfectly shaped 3d anatomy bodies. Inspired by the ancient myths of Daphne, Adonis and Narcissus where people are turned into plants and also by examples from literature where plants are given human characteristics, as happens in “Alice in Wonderland” and the death of the main character of Kahitsi’s novel ‘’Exostis’’, who decides to die alone in his mansion, from asphyxia caused by the tropical plants of a jungle that literally covers the house and him.
 
Vegetation can easily symbolize abandonment and decay and at the same time bloom regeneration and life. So the figures in this project can be seen as human bodies lost under the vegetation   or as hybrid creatures of a fairy tale.                                           

B L O O M 

This project is a series of photographs taken during the first quarantine . Feeling that I was stuck at home, I had to use whatever resources I had. I started paying attention to stuff I had in the house and the potential they had to be used as art materials. I ended up experimenting with photography using household items in order to create ephemeral sculptural compositions . I was interested in the connection we share with the element of water and I used  the famous painting of Sandro Botticelli ‘’ Birth of Venus ‘’ as my inspiration .I used mirrors and glass as a way to play around the concepts of reflection , clarity and transparency and eyes cut out of old magazines in order to create dreamy hybrids.

The Birth of Venus

The relationship between the human body ,water and the unconscious is the base of this project .Through history the element of water has many times been deeply associated with the unconscious .Carl Yung in his philosophy states “The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness’’  and both him and Freud seem to have portrayed the ocean as the big  planetary subconscious.We travel and float on the surface of water but underneath there are unbelievable depths full of mysteries. No one can tell where the  surface ends and where the deep waters begin because there is no defined line between them.The sea stands there in it’s darkness , far away from the crazy lights of our civil world. It’s a place other that exists in parallel with us and in it’s own time. I have always been fascinated by the sea and the feeling you get underwater , a feeling so strong and unique but one that is not easy to describe. Consider the following artwork as an attempt to describe this feeling of otherness of non place of non time .In this project I use a scene from Blue Planet 2 / The Deep documentary series as my main inspiration associatively combined with a phrase of the Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe “Now If I could only remember my name Then I could find out who I was who I am” Moment of Freedom / Jens Bjørneboe , 1966

In the documentary the crew manages with new technologies to capture footage of the deepest places in our oceans explored so far.It is fascinating when  you think that as humanity we travel and investigate space but yet we know so little about our oceans and their wonders. 

The paradox fact of a lake existing in the bottom of the ocean gave me the title of the project ‘’ The lake under the sea ‘’ With this artwork I recreate the scene from the documentary in the form of an installation.It is a space filled with black damp soil .In the middle there is a lake. From the soil small black fingers emerge mimicking the dancing sea worms . Over the lake there is a sculpture hanging from the ceiling. The sculpture is made with wire ,epoxy clay , polymer clay ,glass and silicone. It is a hybrid that explores the human-nature dipole and with it I aim to place us as humans over the reflecting lake in the bottom of the sea.  


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Melina Mosland

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