WHERE IS THE PARADISE?

**foto by Lisa, mother of the children**

Molly and Theo, 4 years old, , immediately when they entered my studio, very spontansly recognizing them selfes in “Paradise” . They just had promise S:t Claus to stop using their teat! … not an easy task!

PARADISE… the place to bee

From a certain point of view one may say that

many beliefs implying the coincidentia oppositorum

reveal a nostalgia for a lost Paradise, a nostalgia for

a paradoxical state in wich the contraries exist

side by side without conflict and the multiplications

form aspects of a mysterious Unity

[Mircea Eliade: ”The Two and The One”, 1965]

I’m working on a project that is like a big prayer to life it self

… 112 faces, molded in plaster!

… out of the same clay original, are arranged in a large wooden structure, measuring 230”x116” . This work is like an exhibition of it’s own.In europe the emergency number is 112. The clay face was first made in 1993, a daily process in order to capture a state of mind I was in need of at that time… longed for… a God-like state of bliss, happy simplicity and warmth, an eternal gaze that could embrace and forgive the shortcomings of human condition. Later in 1995, the idea with duplication of the face, but with different attributes evolved and I started to mold the faces. When I got the necessary space, a new studio 1997, I started the work to put the faces together… to find the hidden links between their manifestations. Off and on I’v been working at this huge, deep and strange creation … from the dephts of my heart, reaching out to meet and understand the unknown… the only way to reach beyond fear… it’s about connecting within in order to reach out!

2018… and I’m still working at it!

orginalansiktet — All facec are cast in the same mould… from this sculptured clay face!

When you have listened not to me,

but to the Meaning, it is wise within

the same Meaning to say: One is All.

[Herakleitos, Fragment 50]

The faces… I can feel them all!

The faces should be looked upon as a gallery displaying different typizised behavioral patterns, strategies for survivel in our modern society, expressed with a lot of humor. Every character is recoqnized by its’s attributes, and hopefully, most people will find a face they know all to well!… as for myself, I feel I have them all inside of me! The faces are arranged in such a way that each and everyone are aligned in character to, and correspond in some way to it’s 4 adjacent faces, and thus all the 112 faces form an interlocking weave of related characters. Are we different or are we very musch alike? It’s all dependent upon the perspective or scale one choses to behold ones fellow citizens. We may seem to be entangled in a web of fear, antagonism and secret desires, but maybe we all mean the same, and have the same experience when we say Paradis… and it´s not a place!