About the Work

SELF Sin & Air consists of two related works held in tension through form, surface, and absence.

One element is a square wooden support with rounded corners, perforated by a pattern transferred from a photograph of the fence surrounding a safe injection site in Copenhagen. Each aperture is drilled by hand and infilled with gold pigment. The surface holds value and void simultaneously, maintaining precision while registering repetition, labour, and residue.

The second element is circular, linen-covered, and marked by a drawn grid. Silver-thread knots are placed at fixed points along a simple cross structure. The knots function as points of binding and suspension rather than closure, holding the surface in a state of restrained tension.

Commissioned for an exhibition at Hjorths Fabrik, Bornholm’s Museum of Ceramics, the work enters into dialogue with ceramic processes in which ground minerals and metals are transformed through heat and duration. This logic of material conversion is held against a field of refusal: perforation without passage, value without restitution.

The surface operates as receptacle (chōra), held between presence and absence. Transformation remains incomplete. Meaning is withheld, held instead in repetition, drilled absence, and the maintenance of an unresolved ground.

© Camilla Howalt