WOOLHOUSE

YEAR: 2003.

GROUP EXHIBITION: »in-Tangible«, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, MADC, San José, Costa Rica.

MATERIALS: Recycled woolly sweaters sewn into cushion covers and wallpaper. Wooden house, green PVC roofing sheets, 24x36 mm colour negatives, and colour prints.

WOOLHOUSE is a house constructed of wood from the jungles of Costa Rica. The house is fitted onto the outside of the museum building in a window niche. The back wall of the house in the niche is open, facing in towards the window. From inside the house the public are able to see through the window into the exhibition rooms of the museum. The inside of the house is lined with woolly sweaters sewn together. The sweaters were collected from secondhand shops in Denmark and feature a design originating from the Nordic cultural tradition. Inside the museum, 6 portraits of my closest female relatives hang surrounding the window. Each family member is wearing the same woolly sweater used on the walls of the house outside, thus creating a visual connection between
interior and exterior.

WOOLHOUSE is part of the same processual sequence as FREE and GULT HUS MED HUL_YELLOW HOUSE WITH A HOLE. The actual exhibition »in-Tangible« deals with a dialogue between Latin America and Scandinavia. Hence the work poses the question of how we as individuals encounter foreign cultures. I chose to focus on the gaze
in relation to this encounter, thus creating a space for this specific situation.
The public can be in the house outside the exhibition while looking in through the window of the exhibition hall. At the same time the people in the exhibition hall can look out at the people looking in from the house.
The window of the museum building represents the mental distance between the two cultures. The 6 portraits of my family members also look back at the audience as they look out through the window.

BACK TO PROJECTS