Thank you Märit Aronsson for this interview in Artscene Trondheim:
https://artscene.no/
Marie Sjøvold and Charlotte Thiis-Evensen work on the basis of personal events. They have different methods, but share an interest in the transitions in life: between sleep and waking, childhood and adult life, and – as in the exhibition Slutten (The End) – life and death.
The End; life and death. They have worked together for five years. This is the second exhibition they are doing together, and a third is already planned. I met them at Dropsfabrikken.
Märit: How did your collaboration begin?
Charlotte: The first time we met was when I was doing a reportage about sleep for the programme ‘Nasjonalgalleri’ on NRK. Marie was one of the artists I interviewed, and we connected well right away. I asked her and Arne Vinnem, another artist, about doing an exhibition together, at Kristiansand Kunsthall. That was in 2016, and the exhibition, which was given the name Oppvåkning (Awakening) –
was related to among other things sleep, but also to more existential themes.
Marie: I knew about Charlotte’s works, also before we began to work together. Working so close to your own life and the various experiences you have in phases of life is a universe I can recognise myself in. The ideas often come to us very intuitively, but we spend a long time, often several years, working them up to what becomes the final project.
You both work on the basis of your own lives, and personal events?
M: Yes, there are many similarities, even though the expression is different. There can be transitional phases in life that trigger works. I use the camera as a tool to try to understand existential situations. Something changes; for example one person disappears and a new one appears. When my grandmother suffered from dementia, and at the same time I was very pregnant, I had an acute need to work with that. I use the camera to be there for moments, so I can understand a bigger totality afterwards. The works I create out of pure necessity are, I suppose, those that communicate best, where I have had a genuine need to tell a story.
C: I’m very interested in everyday life here and now, and often think that after all, we all have to die, so it’s just a matter of making the most of life. It isn’t really that I am so afraid to die.
You, Charlotte, work with documentary, for example in the programme ‘The Architect’s Home’ on NRK. What do you do to balance the documentary and the artistic?
I work in very varied ways: short documentary films, TV programmes and abstract art films. I use the documentary toolbox as a method which in a way I distort here. How much of it I have experienced personally, the public doesn’t need to know. It may be about personal grief, but insofar as the work isn’t directly documentary, I hope it becomes more universal.
When you work with death as a theme, it’s likely that in some sense that includes spirituality and religion. What attitude do you have to that in your work?
C: We have both worked with religious rituals. After all, the candlestick on the floor has a certain symbolism, and a direct association with the church interior. That an exhibition can function as a religious space is quite fine. But beyond that neither Marie nor I are particularly religious.
M: It’s a natural association . I’m not religious, but I’m fascinated by symbolic acts in connection with crucial episodes in life. That you open the window when a person dies, for example. And I have photographed funeral flowers which are included in the exhibition as photographic sculptures. I was given free access to the flowers that had been thrown and spent a lot of time in the chapel in Asker Church. One day while I was standing with the agents from the funeral parlour waiting for a funeral to be over, one of them said to me: you know, death is very small part of my job, I work mostly with life.
Are art and the exhibition space places where non-religious people can find comfort?
C: Yes, for me that space means a great deal. Both because I’m interested in architecture and because it is a space I can visit to find comfort and peace. And it’s interesting to go back to the art spaces and feel the various experiences you have, independently of the art that is shown there. I’m very fond of the Vigeland Museum, for example. There’s something atmospheric and timeless about it.
M: Our works are open enough to play on a range of different emotions, and comfort can be one of them that can have an impact independently of the viewer’s references and history. For me I suppose quite honestly it’s often the case that I prefer to visit nature to seek comfort.
Speaking of exhibition spaces, tell me about how you composed the exhibition!
C: We always make models of the exhibition space – here too. But this time we simply had to reject the original plan and begin all over again. There was something that just didn’t fit. Instead we have tried to engage the works in a clearer dialogue with one another than has been done before. We’ve had to take many works away to create a calmer composition. We like people to pause at a work rather than rush on to the next one.
We work separately, with one exception, the work Due (Dove). It’s a photo of a dead pigeon that lay outside the Sandefjord Art Society. In that photograph we managed to capture the ambivalence we seek in our work.
The theme is after all death, but we like to get some lightness into the exhibition too. That’s why we brought in a few older works, for example the videos with the ladies dancing with the exercise hoops. That makes it less of a one-track thing.
As I understand it, this is your second exhibition together, and then comes another one, so they form a trilogy, one could perhaps say. For each exhibition you have also produced a book, which is a work of art in its own right. Can you talk about them?
C: Yes, the next book and exhibition has a venue but not a title yet. It will take place in 2026, and by then we will have worked together for ten years. When we work with the books, each contributor is allowed to leave a clue that they send on to the next person. A bit like the paper chase games we played when we were small. We’re very interested in the way things move when you pass something on to someone else. It’s generous and fine to be together in something.
Yes, the business with cycles is something that recurs.
C: It’s great fun not knowing what it will become – there’s an unpredictabilty there. Cycles are very clear in nature, and we both have a lot of natural elements in our pictures. In nature there’s room for metaphors and ideas that can be understood immediately and don’t necessarily need to be explained so clearly.
M: The cycles recur in many of the projects. For example I’ve worked with the seasons throughout a whole year, with recurring periods of dark and light – the way nature is also present in us human beings as a kind of mental landscape.
Can you tell me more about how you work?
M: When I start a project I usually know what it will be about, and I lay down a clear framework for how I am to work with it. Within that framework I can permit myself to work very freely. At some point it may be that I have to reassesss the work and see whether the project has become something else. I try to let it develop.
I feel so close to everything I lost began with me avoiding social media and my smartphone for a whole year. I wanted to get rid of distractions, like when you just pick up the mobile and scroll with no plan. Those times I had the impulse to pick up the phone on a whim, I picked up the camera instead. I registered the scene around me, and took a picture. That way I took control of my bad habit.
What happened when you weaned yourself off the smartphone and social media?
Gradually it became clear that it wasn’t about social media, or switching off, because I very quickly got used to not letting myself be distracted by my smartphone. It just took a couple of months. What happened was that I gained a different presence. That changed the way I see my surroundings, and the way I take photographs. Now it’s more about the great silence, the closeness to nature and to the people close to me, but that too requires silence, which becomes a magnifying glass for one’s own feelings.