Bound Form, 2025

Seven sculptures made from pine.

Bound Form is a series of seven sculptures made from contour-cut wedges of pine. They are suspended from the ceiling and lit so that they create a shadow play across the walls.

The wooden sculptures are shaped from contours traced from photographs of people, animals and places I love. Seen from some angles, the same contours appear in both the sculptures and the shadows they cast; from other angles, they dissolve. The works are a kind of materialized memory images: both tangible and fleeting, heavy and weightless, recognizable and distorted. They are introduced with an anecdote:

But you’re an artist, my doctor said. Couldn’t you process your emotions through your art?


No, period, I said.



Yet, the question lingered in my mind. What does it mean to process emotions through art, and what forms might this take? Therapeutic storytelling, solace and catharsis through free form? Or is it more a matter of working your way through it? Shaping, lifting, carrying, learning, measuring, cutting, milling, thinking, screwing, sweating, constructing, constructing, constructing.

The method of giving form, using two-dimensional shadow images as a starting point for shaping in three dimensions, is similar to the method I used in the work Taking Form (Formdannelse). Where Bound Form originates in personal images and is concerned with processing emotions, Taking Form is a site-specific work concerned with encounters between organic and human-made form. A common thread in both works is the materialization of something fleeting, and a tension between shaping according to delimiting principles and shaping freely, following the imagination.


Production:

The sculptures are made in collaboration with Arne Skaug Olsen (woodwork), Soheil Hivad Nabi (3D-modelling and CNC), and Cameron MacLeod (planning), at Aldea, Bergen.

Production support: 

Lorck Schive Art Prize