Follow the lines

Artist: Marit Silsand
Details: Series of photographs, 50 x 70 cm, Edition of 9 + 1 artist proof
Price: 8,000 NOK
For inquiries please email office@praksisoslo.org

Marit Silsand, Follow the Lines # 5, 2018, C-type print, 50 x 70 cm, Edition of 9 + 1 artist proof, Price 8000 NOK

Marit Silsand, Follow the Lines # 10, 2018, C-type print, 50 x 70 cm, Edition of 9 + 1 artist proof, Price 8000 NOK

Marit Silsand, Follow the Lines # 7, 2018, C-type print, 70 x 50 cm, Edition of 9 + 1 artist proof, Price 8000 NOK

Marit Silsand, Follow the Lines # 9, 2018, C-type print, 70 x 50 cm, Edition of 9 + 1 artist proof, Price 8000 NOK

Marit Silsand speaks with PRAKSIS director, Nicholas John Jones and artist Elise Hoebeke about her series Follow the lines 

EH: Your photographic series Follow the lines plays with colour, texture, and combinations of pattern. Abstract compositions are generated by manipulating awning fabric, a recognisable everyday material. We could think of the fabric both as a medium in itself and as your photographic subject. When you chose it, were you thinking of it simply as a medium for formal exploration, or as a connotative substance - something rich in associations? 

MS: I made this work in 2017, at a time when I felt a strong need to work privately in the studio, away from social interactions. Previously, I’d been making photographic portraits, a process that intrinsically relies on complex human interaction. With hindsight I can see why; my mother had fallen ill and I was very involved with her and her health workers. I needed space to be alone and focus on something else. 

I turned to this type of textile as an object that I’ve been attracted to since I was a child. With their varied colours and patterns, awnings are a kind of visual signature: an identifier that expresses the individuality of a house’s occupants. In addition, awnings change uniquely through time through the action of the Norwegian weather. I first noticed this when my father took down a large blue awning from my grandmother’s house. It had been inscribed by the action of sun, wind, rain and snow over two generations. Her house was by the sea, so salt had also made an impact. This “visual documentation of time” fascinated me. I started to play with the fabric in the studio, folding, cutting, sewing and restructuring it to “own” and personalise the material. Experiments with differently patterned and coloured awnings from other homes followed, as I scavenged my area and searched websites for raw materials. That’s how my awning-collecting habit grew!

So in answer to your question, the formal qualities of this material are important but its “archeological” dimension - its material testimony and its personal resonances - are equally important. Because of this, the treatment of colour in these prints is as “true to life” as I can make it. I try to create straightforward “documents” of the fabrics because each of the awnings I’ve used in Follow the lines has a personal, mnemonic resonance for particular individuals. It’s important to me that this sense of the unique and personal, embedded in the photographic subject, is legible in each of the photos. 

NJ: These photos hint at a huge number of art historical references across the fields of geometric abstraction, sculpture, and photography. Which particular areas of the abstract tradition are most important to you, in respect of these photos?

MS: I’m really fascinated by the Bauhaus movement and the Bauhaus makers’ embrace of industrial methods and prefabrication. However, the processes in my photo series are evidently of a different order, since I’m taking fragments of a material that was originally prefabricated -  mass-produced - and isolating them to give them a new, unique existence and identity.

I also see resonances between these photos and Bauhaus period geometric landscapes - for example the geometric abstractions of Bauhaus teachers Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. I’m much influenced by both artists, especially Albers’s theories of perception and color and the legacies of his practice in Op-art and graphic art. The relationship between these photos and Op Art is probably pretty clear. I’m taking a flat “canvas” and manipulating it to produce illusory forms,  patterns, even colors, so that in optical terms the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts- the viewer sees more going on than there actually is. So the project has allowed me both to explore patterns and colors in a really playful, free fashion, but also to be in a dialogue with some of the figures in my personal “canon” of art history. 

EH: I find the idea of “touch” important in this series - when we look at these photos, we read off both the tactile qualities of the fabric you're using, and your haptic skill in manipulating it.  

MS: That’s great, because I really wanted this project to bring out materiality and the experience of touch. Initially, I thought of my experiments with the textile itself as the end point of this project, but the process led me to a re-acknowledgement that I’m a photographer and I think like a photographer. There was a clear need to frame each textile work as a single fixed two-dimensional image: to introduce photography’s three-dimensional illusionism into the equation. 

I wanted people to “feel” the material on the contact surface in a way that is similar to the rayographic process (cameraless photography that involves placing objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light). I sought a similar interaction with surface by taking my photographic subjects into the digital darkroom, and using digital equipment such as scanners to imbue the photos with strongly tactile qualities. 

The process succeeded to the extent that when the photos were first exhibited (at artist-led space Fossen Rom & Forlag in Oslo in 2018) some of the visitors asked permission to touch the “fabric” on the wall. Swedish critic Tommy Olsson articulated their confusion nicely, describing his impression first that the works were drawings, and then that they were textile art, followed by a sense of “insecure weightlessness… when it eventually sinks in that these are fresh photographs straight from the printer.”  

NJ: We might say that this project probes two contradictory faces of the medium of photography: both its forensic capacity to capture the real, and its illusionism - the geometric grid of pixels that “swarm” into eye-deceiving formations! Thank you, Marit, for sharing these insights into this absorbing series of works.