BARBRO HERNES often takes inspiration from newspaper clippings. The chosen photographic material depicts crime-scenes or scenes from some conflict-ridden places somewhere around the world. The somewhat horrifying documents show events concerning death and mutilation, and when it is used in this way, it becomes a strong reminder of the fragility of life.
Barbro Hernes transforms these images and transfer them to ceramic house-forms. She is searching for clearness and simplicity when she creates the shapes of her houses, a form which in itself presents a strong symbolic value to the audience. The House has been a symbol of the safe and secure shelter, well known and dear, which gives a motherly protection, but it also symbolises the shadowy unreachable places of the human mind. These images, the abstraction of the scenes, applied onto the houses' outer walls, stand in sharp contrast to the houses' impenetrable closeness. One of the pictures form shadows from a group of people. Does this show an image of passive spectators - or do we see a threatening mob?
This way of using fragments of News-documentary creates a duality: The house-forms change character in the confrontation with the photography and become small monuments.
KryssXPunkt
Jenny Alnaes, Grete Lis Bibalo, Jannecke Lonne Christiansen, Barbro Hernes
The four artists who represent KRYSS PUNKT have a common understanding
of photography as a tool which offers various strategies for organizing REALITY.
To create the necessary distance to the ever pressing and sometimes threatening facts of the world, they transpose this reality by ways of artistical means and change it into something manageable.
The idea of the project is based on the artists common attitude to photography as such. Namely as a tool to be used as raw-material in the process of creating the final work, without taking away its own identity. The condition for this brake of reality is found in our expectation of the authenticity of photography and its representation of something which HAS BEEN. This feeling is sti...