If you walk down that street, you will be killed ….

At the age of 17, I had travelled alone to the city of Diyarbakir in the Kurdish area in Eastern Turkey. I wanted to make a difference and bring documentation back to Denmark about how the Kurdish people were being oppressed. As I get off the bus after a 12-hour journey, it is night and the stench is nauseating. Garbage lies in meter-high piles on the main street and flies buzz around my head. It turns out that the garbage collectors are on strike against the Turkish authorities, who have placed 7 Turkish provinces under a state of emergency – precisely where many Kurds live. A young man comes towards me and says: “If you walk down that street, you will be killed ….”

But what is the right path? Should I have gone with him or continue in the direction I had intended to go?

There is a threshold between the idea one can have in one’s mind and the reality that exists outside. This challenge applies both to my artistic work and to my way of being in the world. A threshold is a boundary and a point of transition, and in my artistic practice there can be thresholds, i.e. ideas of how my painting “should” be. It is in the encounter with these thresholds and resistances that my work begins to inspire and move me.

I want to show paintings that arise from the spark that also, as a 5-year-old, made me paint in my room without thinking about art. I seek the immediate urge to create, where curiosity and wonder are the driving forces.

Since I graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1996, I have immersed myself in how presence in relation to personal memories and particularly sensitive layers of meaning can spontaneously arise in ‘the painted’. My interest, especially in architecture – both in the urban, in nature, and in the interior – is not rooted in wanting to create romanticised, grand and powerful glossy images. The architecture in my paintings functions as images of the systems in which ‘the human’ attempts to function. Therefore, I paint the architecture and the systems so that cracks appear and as if they are about to fall apart. In my paintings there must be space for ‘that’ which does not fit in – a place for the imperfect whole human being with all its shadow sides. This applies not only in the motif, but also in my painting method itself, which is deliberately rough, unpolished, and non-conforming. Water and oil separate like two temperaments, and between them surprising processes arise, which I can never fully control.

My inspiration arises from fragments of memory, personal photographs, spontaneous improvisations and the feelings that usually, unconsciously, press themselves forward. I am concerned with expressing a duality – a dissonance between loss, loneliness and the feeling of not fitting in, while at the same time having a dream of belonging, of being part of a community. An emotional wondering that has only become more present over the years.