About the Work

By enforcing the combination of several elements within one piece, I have looked to artists in various fields. To name a few: Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect, whose architecture offers serenity and a stillness that I myself seek and long for within art and life, has inspired my thinking about placement and the juxtaposition of otherwise abstracted objects. At the other end of the emotional scale, Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet who wrote the Duino Elegies, gave me a sense of courage to explore the nature of emotional implosion.

Derivation is comprised of three main elements divided between two rooms. In the first room, one enters a space illuminated in red light, created by the backside of a carpet painted deep red and hung one metre inside the installation entrance, creating a corridor through which the viewer must pass. Upon entering the space, the viewer encounters the back of a solitary life-size female figure made of white felt. What first appeared to be a hanging red carpet is now seen from the other side: a cream-coloured carpet through which thousands of strings are sewn.

In the second room, one sees a wooden construction in the shape of an upright rooftop standing on the floor beside a square box. The box, leaning and balancing on one edge of one of the roof trusses, is placed centre stage, also with its back turned to the viewer. Both the box and the rooftop are shrouded on the inside in black granite-grey carpet, except for the floor, upon which lies an enlarged photograph of a neutral face with closed eyes beneath water. When the viewer stands in the room looking into the box, the wooden construction is framed by a red square painted onto the wall in the opposite corner, reciprocating the size and backside colour of the carpet in the first installation room.

Both materials and concepts connect the pieces, as each occupies the home of intimacy, the area of the floor, and the relations between these. The thematic concern of the work is based on an internal sense of emotional space, touching on the idea of a pre-existing and somehow innate emptiness sometimes experienced within existence, sometimes lying dormant like the photograph beneath the water.

By placing the work in two installation rooms – divided yet connected – I hoped to enable an experience that would operate laterally and evoke associative thinking in the viewer.

©️ Camilla Howalt