Uffe arrives in Australia today with his show at RAYGUN next Wednesday. Ali and I will work with him on his install for the next couple of days so it should be fun. Ali has been racing around town buying topary trees for the night….. 

Questions & Answers & Questions 

As a practicing artist what are the issues\concerns you have been consistently addressing within your artwork?   

As a living being I am consistently addressing a vast number of issues. There is no real dividing line between me as a person and me as a practicing artist. Which makes me an unprofessional artist, or a professional person. And that has mainly been my focus during my practice/life; how we perceive ourselves as human beings and how we try to push these limits. 

Do you classify your art as being one thing more than the other e.g. photography, film, painting, sculpture, music or installation and do you see an expansion into other mediums in the future?   

My initial response to this question would be something along the lines of: As a conceptual founded artist I choose to follow whatever material the idea would want to materialize itself in – the aesthetics follows the inherent logical conclusions of the becoming of the artwork.That is however not entirely true, or fulfilling as an answer. I very often choose to work with objects in a sculptural sense – because I want them, I fetishize them, and they keep piling up, physically and mentally, and when they get on top of each other they seem to mate, and create new baby thoughts; small soap bubbles of ideas that hover in my studio. The most persistent ones I catch, and they can take on new shapes, as combinations of some of these various objects and take form within another medium. Recently, I’ve used a 3D graphic artist to realize a still image, which in turn might become an animation later on, and in the near future I’ll use a blacksmith to work with copper pipes, for a larger project, but both works are about the body and the it’s representation through a wireframe perspective. The medium is not the message here – I think that if there is a change in sight for me, it might be a change in production, rather than in medium. Which leads me back to my initial sentence, which has now become totally true: As a conceptual founded artist I choose to follow whatever material the idea would want to materialize itself in – the aesthetics follows the inherent logical conclusions of the becoming of the artwork. 

When you think about making new work do you always consider applying a degree of historical content or do the works weigh more heavily towards a more personal investigation? 

I don’t consider it, it just happens. Everything within sight is of interest, and history is as relevant as the intensity of colour, a geometric abstraction, the newest scientific research or political manifestations. All these things, and more so, are but colours on our canvas, so to speak. I don’t differ between personal investigation and historical content, but I hesitate every time I use my own history as a reference, because there is a fine line between what is true to many people and what is true to me. Some artists understand to walk that fine line, but I guess that’s because their personal history is somewhat synced with what we consider to be the history of the world. Again, I try not to be too deliberate, because then art becomes calculation and that’s manipulation or marketing to me. 

When you look back through this body of work do you see any answers unfolding within this investigation? 

I have to take this last question very literally. I guess you can see art making as playing with paper fortune tellers. You remember those origami toys, where you fold a piece of paper to a petal, put numbers on the flaps and move them with your fingers until the asker/player is manipulated to choose the flap you want them to choose, under which lies the message that you wrote when you constructed the paper fortune teller. You can only make eight different messages, but as long as your audience changes, you can keep it going for quite some time.  I just like looking at all the answers at once. When you have eight truths displayed at the same time, they sort of level each other out, and become the truth about the mechanism, which is in turn perhaps more like a long poem. I like to see my body of work like that. I hope this answers your question?