About the Work
This work consists of two pieces.

One is a square wooden board with rounded corners, with a pattern of holes transferred from a photograph of the fence surrounding a safe injection site in Copenhagen. Each hole was drilled by hand and filled with gold paint.

The other is round, covered in linen, with a drawn grid. In each corner, a knot is tied with silver thread, placed to follow a simple cross.

Commissioned for an exhibition at Hjorts Fabrik, Bornholm’s Museum of Ceramics, the piece reflects on the beauty of glazes - ground granite and metals transformed into something new.

This process, contrasted with the harsh reality of addiction and the emptiness full of promise that fills the holes of the Copenhagen fence, examines the tension between value and absence.

The work suggests a cycle of longing, decay, and attempted transformation, reminiscent of the Midas complex: the more we grasp at what we desire, the further we push ourselves away from what truly sustains us.

What follows is a poetic text accompanying the work - a personal and mythic reflection on the body, transformation, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined.

Skin - our collective Kora

Still greasy and moist, the skin carries traces of a cold and barren winter - poised at the threshold between meaning and meaninglessness. From psyche to body, something is deposited beyond an imagined boundary. The object in the work takes on a quality of objectivity; it resists the female body, the subject.

This is not just about sexuality. As part of the animal realm, the work explores that which unsettles identity - system, order - a space for sensual rupture. Here, at this edge, I separate myself from the insistent and painful materiality of death. This is the border between real and phantasmagoric perceptions.

An aesthetic experience of the emaciated body arises—both a part of and apart from the skin. It emerges in the holes. It tingles with hair. The object becomes one of and in the skin. Animalistic, yes - but with the trace of a cultivated elegance.

It is also a site of primary regression, where divided organs occupy a liminal zone - the human’s human body. It is a sacrifice, a kind of predetermined living dead. A specific decay, even deformation - a conscious choice to side with what is radically excluded from the nourishing projections of life.

With transference comes love. The space fractures - drawing us back again and again into its circuit. It is more of an unconscious terrain. A mature knot, a mythical node, shaped by personal archaeology. A space willing to surrender, even sacrifice, its own etymology. A threshold state, or transformation in process?

The historically abject is perverse, precisely because it neither submits nor refuses - it defies prohibition, undercutting boundaries, laws, and conventions. In this, a moment of recognition occurs between the skin of the earth and the skin of the body.

This is articulated through a linear architecture of repetition, tracing what feels like something new inside an otherwise entrenched societal framework. A grounded object, covered in skin and hair, uses the female body as a site from which to speak - not only of desire and power - but to deconstruct the expectations of the feminine Other. It becomes both subject and object, held in relation to Kora - the feminine form.

© Camilla Howalt