Krabbesholm Højskole
A series of interviews, and photographic study conducted by Louise Le Meur
Louise is an eighteen year old half French, half Danish student at Krabbesholm Højskole in the North of Denmark. While mainly focusing on the studies of video art and photography, Louise is interested in all media. She trains herself to be eclectic in her practice. From jewelry making to embroidery and collages, she likes to work on all matters that require a lot of patience. Louise grew up in France, but is now living in Denmark. This double life allows her eyes to be open wider, taking in from both cultures and their features. She uses her multicultural background to find originality, and innovation in her work.
Katja Dons Petrusson
Louise Le Meur: Tell me about yourself.
Katja Dons Petrusson: I am born and raised in Oslo, Norway. At the moment I’m currently living in Denmark where I’ve spent the last 10 months living, and going to an art and design school. My interest in photography developed during the past nine years, after I got my first camera when I was 11 years old.
I will stay in Denmark for a while after school ends, but I find it comfortable not to think more than half a year ahead. I like to keep possibilities open. Hopefully, I will get to travel around during the next year. That’s what inspires me the most, letting myself experience a whole different atmosphere than the one I’m used to.
LLM: What is your relationship to art? What does it mean to you?
KDP: Throughout my twenty years of living it feels like my dad’s had this big project of exposing me, and my sister to as much art as possible. Bringing objects to our home, and taking us to all kinds of museums. I believe that is where my interest in art has its origin. However, I would say it is throughout the last four years of my life that I've started developing my own approach to art, and design. It has become something I find essential. Working with it in some way on a daily basis, either with photography either in another way.
I am eager to create, and express myself through creation. Either with my hands in a wood workshop, or making ceramics, or in the darkroom with negatives. The last couple of years have been an important time where I’ve gotten a more artistic approach to photography as a medium. I have started combining it with a more analogue way of working. Integrating photography with elements from graphic design, and working with classical handcrafts such as embroidery and weaving, is something I find very satisfying, and exciting to explore.
LLM: How do you approach photography as a medium to express yourself?
KDP: Art has become, throughout the last five years of my life, a strong part of who I am and how I approach my surroundings. Photography has become my way of expressing a way of being.
LLM: Is there a special atmosphere in your work?
KDP: I think it varies from time to time. Different characters give different kinds of feelings. The pictures then provide different forms of expression. So the atmosphere is not constant.
LLM: How do you choose the subjects you photograph?
KDP: When photographing people I often search for facial features I find interesting, and photogenic in some ways. I photograph people, most of the time, during situations I find myself in. It is not very often that I plan photoshoots, but when I do, I like it too.
LLM: What relationship do you create with your subjects?
KDP: Naturally I find photographing people the best when the we find us safe in each other’s company. I try to make a shoot as playful, and chill as possible. I don’t like it when it feels too shoot-like. I think the best result is created when the one being photographed, and the photographer relax in each other’s company. I like to make it feel like taking a walk together, and I try to get to know the person while I photograph them so it feels more like hanging out with a friend than a shoot.
LLM: Does being a women influence the way you work, or look at things?
KDP: I have not thought so much about how being a woman can effect the way I look at my motives, but in some way I sure think it does. I try to challenge myself every time I photograph. It’s about pushing my own boundaries in the way to connect with a person, or putting myself in new situations that makes me think in a different way.
The female gaze is very important to me personally as I find it important for women to embrace their womanhood in a world dominated by men. We must not feel restricted by our condition in any way.
I try myself to be conscious about this when working with my photography or other kind of work. I think I like to feel like my creativity is limitless in some ways when creating, it makes it easier to trust myself whenever the feeling of insecurity appears.
LLM: Could you write in few words the reason why you do photography?
KDP: To eternalize what I find beautiful within life.
Lina Knudsen
Louise Le Meur: Tell me yourself.
Lina Knudsen: My name is Lina. I’m 19 years old. I’ve lived in Bergen, Norway my whole life. In January, I moved to Skive, Denmark. Here I’m studying graphic design at the Krabbesholm Art school. Before I came here I had mainly worked with illustration, and ceramics. Now I get to explore my creativity in a new context, with other creative people.
LLM: What is your relationship to art? What does it mean to you?
LK: My grandfather was an architect, and my grandmother studied at the Bergen Academy of Art when she was 60, after raising six children. My mother is a textile artist, and has covered our childhood home both with her textiles and pantings directly on the walls. Thus, I grew up in a home were I was surrounded by art, among a family that cares a lot about aesthetics. My adolescence has been crucial to me for I inherited that mentality.
Art is very important to me. To draw and make art in different forms such as ceramics is among the things that enjoy the most.
LLM: How did you begin to draw?
LK: Like any other child I drew whenever there was a piece of paper in front of me. I’ve continued drawing because I enjoyed it. When I was younger and too “sick” to go to school I often went with my mom to her atelier, and drew for days until I wasn’t “sick” anymore.
LLM: What is your primary source of inspiration?
LK: I like to say that I get inspired by myself, because what I draw is always based on something about me in one way or the other, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. My mother inspires me. I really feel her dedication to her work, and I think that it is important to be dedicated to what you do. I also find inspiration in my everyday surroundings, like things I see, strangers and people Im with. I’ve also been influenced by other artists, for example my ceramic teacher who really has opened my eyes, and inspired me to continue drawing and pottery.
LLM: What is your favorite thing to draw?
LK: I try to dig deeper into what’s my style, without stopping to experiment with new techniques. Mostly I draw people and especially faces. In the absence of ideas for drawing motives, I often draw what I see around me.
LLM: What would be the ideal situation to draw?
LK: Laying in the sand with my sketching book beside me on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Chilling in the sun with a Caipirinha in one hand and my drawing pen in the other. Last time I was in this situation I drew a sketch which one of my best friends got tattooed on her arm a few days later.
LLM: Do you succeed in capturing a specific moment, just by the mean of drawing?
LK: It is almost like taking a picture. By drawing them, I feel like there is more room for artistic freedom, and I can choose what part of the picture I want to emphasize.
LLM: Does being a women influence your work?
LK: I have never thought about it to be honest, so I guess not. I try to reflect my personality in my artwork, but being a woman does not influence how or what I draw. My gender is not something that impacts me as a person despite in a physical matter.
Gisa Pantel
Louise Le Meur: Tell me about yourself
Gisa Pantel: Gisa Pantel (born 1988, Germany). I studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Münster and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen where I graduated in 2014. I live and work in Copenhagen, where I am part of the artist-run gallery "SØ".
LLM: How did your interested in art come about?
GP: My mother is a painter, so I grew up in an environment where art was very present.
LLM: What is inspiration for you, where do you find it the most?
GP: I think everything has the potential of being interesting, and I am bored very rarely. It has never been important to me, whether something comes from high- or low-culture. I am equally interested in celebrities, mathematics and history. But for the most part, it's everyday situations that inspire me. A misunderstanding, an embarrassment, an architectural oddity or a weird looking pose in advertisement can trigger a deeper examination.
LLM: What is your creative process like?
GP: I find something that catches my interest, research, research, research, go all the way in, forget about it, remember it a few months later while doodling on a napkin, call a friend, tell an anecdote, start working on something physical, take notes, print the notes to have produced something physical, self doubt, come up with a clear concept, work on it intensely while the outcome is completely different from what I thought, sometimes I accept it, sometimes I produce something that is fast and direct within 10 minutes instead, which often turns out to be the better solution. Repeat.
LLM: What is the relationship between your body and your mind when you are creating?
GP: It is under no circumstance that I can look at my work and see it without knowing that a body, in this case my own, has produced it. I think it's just the way my brain works. If I listen to a violin for example, I imagine what it's like to play it. In a very physical way, to the point that the muscles I would use, get tense. When I look at artworks my reaction is never exclusively mental. There is such a big difference in seeing an exhibit, compared to a documentation of it online, where it's stripped of its presence in space.
LLM: Is there a difference between being a female artist in Denmark versus in Germany?
GP: It is even more mansplaining in Germany.
LLM: What would you recommend to younger aspiring female artists?
GP: I was once told, as a compliment, that my work in an exhibit looked "like a man did it".
Another time I was the only woman in a group show with 5 men, and also the only one not getting funding for work production. Maybe their applications were better, but, well, maybe not. These things are going to happen. Support each other, name-drop each other, invite each other to do shows, collaborate, have fun and try not to get bitter.
Also: ALWAYS make a back-up of your hard drive!
Olivia Turner
Louise Le Meur: Tell me about yourself.
Olivia Turner: My name is Olivia, I'm 19 years old. I've lived in Copenhagen my whole life, and was enrolled in an art school until 9th grade. After graduating high school, I started a preparatory art school at Krabbesholm Højskole, studying literature and fine arts.
LLM: What is your relationship to art? What does it mean to you?
OT: I've always used art as an escape, a way to dive into something while being alone. Literature has always been my chosen medium to express myself, because it's an extremely sensitive and explicit way of exposing oneself. After having been at the preparatory art school, I've started to explore art, and the possibilities of conveying literature through art installations. Making art is about exploring, and expanding one’s perception, and their perspective upon art. Crossing boundaries, and redefining art as a medium.
LLM: What is your creative process like?
OT: I'm an over-thinker. I always have a thousand ideas, and I've got a tendency to overthinking every single one of them before starting the actual piece. Meaning, I've got hundreds of unfinished projects. But I always write a piece either before, or after working on an idea, needing to put it in a literary context. This helps my creative process by seeing which prospects the actual piece of art has in relation to literature.
LLM: How have you become interested in making collages? Why is it a good media to express yourself?
OT: My first experience in making collages was in grad school. We'd had a collage workshop, in which I found great pleasure, and a way to relax by manually cutting, and gluing. This has later developed and become something I do with Photoshop. I enjoy the possibilities of creating new ways of understanding and seeing images in new contexts. In some of my collages there might be over 500 layers of images but only 50 visible to the eye. Collages have a depth and perseverance that in my opinion many other art forms don't have. Furthermore it gives me the possibility to hide and choose what I want to expose of myself to the viewer, but still allowing myself to hide in the layers.
LLM: What role does being a women play in your art, and way of seeing life?
OT: Most art is seen through the male gaze. Being a female artist, and especially one of color means that I have the possibility of "unexotifying" and desexualizing the female body. Women in art are usually portrayed as objects. But I enjoy seeing women through the male gaze and then challenging it by either provoking or recreating an image, or specific perception .
LLM: What are your inspirations?
OT: I'm very inspired by Pop culture. Music, cinema and contemporary art are all outlets that I've taken advantage of. There is a new, and large stream of Danish literature that challenges the traditional literary platform. Caspar Eric, a young danish writer uses Instagram and internet logos in his poetry, opening up a completely new means of expressing oneself. This is a great inspiration for me. It has inspired me to explore new ways of expressing myself.
LLM: You have some specific themes in your work, you focus a lot on gender, feminism and your AfroAmerican identity, how does having grown up in a conservative, and homogenous part of Denmark influenced your work?
OT: I've always stood out, my father being Jamaican and my mother Danish has made me have a very split relationship to the two cultures. I've grown up in Denmark, following Danish traditions. My father has never really exposed me nor my siblings to Jamaican culture, nor African American one. We've watched movies, and visited my family in New York. But as I've grown older, I've become interested in this part of myself. I've wanted to understand it better, meaning I've had to understand my father’s heritage, and culture better. This is very obvious in my art, being very inspired by provoking and atypical African American women such as Grace Jones, who bent gender norms, Jamaican medicine women Nanny of the Maroons and The White Witch of Rosehall. This interest has been sparked by growing up in a very homogenous part of Denmark, where everyone looks the same and acts the same. Not having one's own opinion, and forming one’s own perception of the world, has always been a frustration to me. I believe that to understand the world, and shape one’s own views, you first need to know yourself.
Frederikke Legaard
Louise Le Meur: Tell me about yourself.
Frederikke Legaard: My name is Frederikke and I'm 21 years old. In the last couple of years, I’ve come to realize that I have to work with my hands and intuition, and that resulted in making art with various objects. After high school, I went to Suhrs food academy where I studied Molekylary gastronomics, at something called Nordic Foodlab. When the school year ended, I started collaborating with 2 friends on a catering firm, called Mad Til Venner. Half a year after, I went on a trip with my friend to Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and HongKong for 3 months, to get inspiration and see something completely different. Then I moved to Seattle with my mom for a short period, at that time i decided to apply for the Danish Design School, in the furniture design department. Instead, I started with a sign technician course, where I learned to create signs, typographies, and make identity, and logos. I finished school in January, at the same time I started a clothing brand called GALLOP, where every item is handmade, and every logo has a typography designed by me. This went really well and has become popular. I had to pause the clothing brand, and started at Krabbesholm Folk high school. Now I’ve just been accepted to Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam, where I’m going to spend the next couple of years.
LLM: What is your favorite material to work with right now?
FL: I would say photography or film. It has caught my attention these days, I’ve never worked with it that much before, but I like the way I can manipulate so much with how people see the result. I’m also trying to learn how to animate. But if I had to choose a manual craft as material I would work with wood, plastic or clay.
LLM: What is your relationship to art? What does it mean to you?
FL: To me, it makes sense. I don’t know how I ended up doing art.
I've learned a lot of different practices in the past years, and through art I can combine all of these different experiences and qualities, creating something that makes sense to me.
LLM: What is your creative process like?
FL: The most important thing is that I never compromise with my work. I work fast. Spontaneously and impulsively. People don’t have the chance to comment on my process nor to interfere with it, when I work quickly. If I spent months working on a project, people would have the time, and the opportunity to comment upon my process. Their opinion would probably make my opinion different than if I were alone, and then the result would become weaker. I agree that at times it might be an advantage to have people share their opinions, but right now I think I’m in a place where I need to do things for my self only. It’s a weakness, I’ve always used a lot of energy thinking about what other people think. I try, more and more, to use this kind of overthinking positively.
It is also very important to me that I always have the drive to work on the thing that I’m currently doing. If a project becomes tiresome, it will show in the result.
I’m a perfectionist, and during the last couple of years I found out that it is when I give myself a short time limit, that I like the result the most. My creative process always varies, in function of what I am making. When I make clothes versus when I put together menus or when I do installations for instance versus when I sculpt a sculpture.
LLM: How do you take this process a step further?
FL: I don’t know about that, if I could answer that question easily, I would do it.
Well, it would be nicer with a huge studio, where I could store a lot materials, just being able to walk around them, and getting inspired all the time. I would also like to have a kitchen where I could experiment. I consider myself a collector, I always bring too many things home with me when I travel.
LLM: What links all your different practices?
FL: I use my hands in all of them. But I guess that’s it. I don’t know, maybe there is no link. It all started when I was young. My parents are very creative, they taught me that it’s important to stimulate that side of myself for me to be happy. I believe that making a menu, collecting ingredients and making a dish, followed by plating, and serving it in the right circumstances is an art; in the exact same way painting is an art.
LLM: What does creativity mean to you?
FL: I think the word creative sounds bad in my ear. Thus, here is a Google answer: Being creative means solving a problem in a new way. It means changing your perspective. It means taking risks, and ignoring doubt, facing fears. Breaking the routine, and doing something different for the sake of doing something different.
LLM: Are they some personal qualities that benefit to your creative process but are an obstacle in your everyday life?
FL: Yes, a lot I think. I think everyone has that, I’m very open about it. I have ADHD, it was worse when I was younger, and caused me a lot of trouble growing up. Now it makes me overproduce thoughts, all the time. When I get one thought I produce around 20 to 40 thoughts about that first thought, in a very short time span. This is of a big help when I make art, I’m always ahead of my own thoughts in a way. They speak together. However, in everyday life, it can make everything complicated, and when i’m in a down period, it’s worse. For example, when something is boring, i cant hide it. But, I guess it’s good to be honest.
LLM: If you were to ask three simple questions to yourself, for us to know a little more about who you are, what would they be?
FL: My two favorite albums.
Solange - A Seat At The Table
Yg - Still Brazy
These are only two, but there are a lot more. These are probably the ones I listen to the most, and every time I get positively surprised by each song.
LLM: If I had to wear something for a year everyday, it would be…
FL: Probably my Dickies pants, Clarks Wallabees, a loose dress and a hoodie.
I have 6 pairs of Dickies, 4 different Clarks Wallabees for different occasions and the same hoodie in 12 different colors. I think it took me a few years to accept that I feel the most comfortable in menswear.
LLM: My favorite movie.
FL: The Talented Mr Ripley. Watch it! It’s insane.
Anne Holm
Louise Le Meur: Tell me about yourself.
Anne Holm: I’m incapable of living without licorice, Danish strawberries, red wine, and unfortunately menthol cigarets. I grew up in the countryside among my three precious siblings, our family dog, and lots of chickens, and cows. I would never change that for anything in the world, if.I could. My father, is a 54 year old plumber. He is my lifelong role model and inspiration source. I do love my mother as well. I spent the past three years traveling around Australia, The Philippines, Japan and India, besides being at Krabbesholm Art school. Next on the list is exploring as much of Europe as I can, in a old car, with my unreasonably handsome boyfriend during summer.
I’m 22 years old, and wears underwear that should be worn by a 82 year old, my face is quite symmetrical, and to me a bit boring. I am quite Scandinavian looking. I like my hands, they are strong and have small freckles exactly like my mother’s and grandmother’s. I cry very easily, but I don’t see it as a sign of weakness. I find my self very lucky, and truly appreciate the beauty of life.
LLM: What is your relationship to art? What does it mean to you?
AH: Art is important to me, in the way that I find art extremely helpful in situations where emotions or thoughts are difficult to either explain through words, or just put in order in my head. Art in its original form is fluid in the same way I perceive the word. To me almost everything can be art, you just have to decide it to be. Have reasons for why you think that way. Thus, art is a space of freedom, where you can express your opinions and thoughts.
LLM: How did your interest in writing come about?
AH: I’m actually not sure how, when nor where my interest in writing came to me. I find words beautiful, and have always appreciated language, and dialogues. Words are indispensable in a world like ours. I think that communication becomes art when we use words and language in the right way. That might be why I keep returning to the media of writing, because I am so deeply fascinated by what text, and words can do for us.
LLM: How involved are your personal experiences in your text?
AH: My personal experiences do play a big part in my literary universe. I find myself going back to themes involving puberty, and being a teenager. When I was a teenager, I did not understand the change I mentally, and physically was going through. It made me insecure and sensitive, but at the same time I also remember that I was curious about those thoughts during this long period of time. These are some of the thoughts, and feelings I use and try to understand when I focus my texts on it.
LLM: Where do you draw your inspiration from?
AH: My biggest source of inspiration is from the things I know well, and the people I know well. Experiences that I have grown through. I’m often told that I speculate too much, but when i use my own thoughts, and experiments in my writing, I find that the text I end up with is more reliable and honest, which in my opinion is more interesting.
LLM: You also work with other media, such as sculpture or graphic design. What links those to your practice of writing?
AH: I’m not sure if there is a clear connection in my work besides curiosity. When I work with sculptures or installations, it often starts with an urge to work with a specific material I find interesting. It's in the process of working with a medium, or a text that the idea comes true to the finished work. I try to work with an open, and playful mind, that allows my ideas to run freely, until I have decided where I want to go.
LLM: Does being a woman take a big place in your work and creative process?
AH: Being a woman, has a great impact on my writing, more than it will ever have on my sculptures, ceramics, videos, photography, installations etc. I’m proud to be a woman, and happy to be one. The female creature is complex and beautiful in a thousand different ways. I feel strongly connected to all my fellow females. As mentioned, I often focus my literature on my own experiences, and on the physical and mental changes that an individual undergoes throughout their lives. Thus, since I am a woman, it's both easy, and instructive to place my mind in those type of emotions. VIVA LA WOMEN.
Nanna Lund
Louise Le Meur: Tell me about yourself.
Nanna Lund: Nanna, 21 winters, 20 summers old. From Copenhagen, Denmark. Writes, sculpts, installs, curates. A former student of LungA Art School and Gladiator Writers School, moving to Marrakesh, Morocco in July to do workshops and lectures in Occult Literature at an Art Residency, drink cold milk, and eat dates.
LLM: What is your relationship to art? What does it mean to you?
NL: I didn’t grow up in a so-called creative or artistic family. As a child art was a blurry, at time intangible phenomenon. But, as I grew older, and began having a practice within art, and writing in particular, I found that art was that extended language that my tangled tongue awaited for: an archaeological shovel to get my hands dirty.
When I’m asked: what is art to you? I have such an ambivalent way to talk about art, as a defined concept that strives to become a product, like cooking! I don’t believe it is.
Art is not an office or an atelier: something you can leave in the afternoon, then go to the bistro for dinner, and return to in the morning. Within a conversation with a stranger, when I’m on the internet, looking at my mother or eating lemon slices with sugar. When I sit down, and write, it’s simply an extension -from mind to hands- of these experiences, and charged emotions.
LLM: What is your primary sources of inspiration?
NL: Reading would be my answer. It’s one of the greatest inspirational, didactical and necessary aspects of my daily life. But my sources of inspiration spread from a lunch conversation to the composition of a sound. This morning a hunter was shooting down rooks from the trees above my window, and black birds fell from the sky. When I walked outside, there was dark purple blood on the cobblestones. That inspired me, for instance.
One of the greatest inspirations, I recall, was living in a small fjord in Iceland, and looking out the window on the fishermen working in the harbor: That necessity of every movement, every strapping robe, the throwing of an orange peel, every tightening of a net. This routine and harsh gesture is the same I want to occur in my writing, or in whatever I do.
LLM: What book(s) are you reading at this particular moment?
NL: Oh! I’m reading the most beautiful, yet not so accessible book! Mountains of the Heart by Rainer Maria Rilke. At the same time, I’m reading Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. I have this odd longing for reading about elderly men and their gross desire towards the youth, such as Nabokov’s Lolita. I think I’ll become christian or heart broken once I finish them. It happens quite often, books will wander within me like a flu for weeks, and I’ll feel like stuffing my mouth with ice cubes.
But truthfully, the best literature I’m reading at the moment, are long, sentimental messages send from my friend, Jeppe, on Whatsapp.
LLM: Why did you choose writing? Why is it a good way for you to express things?
NL: Well, working with language as a material - without remembering when it began - has given me the greatest obstructions, frustrations and reliefs. That feeling of a cold tickle that runs to your scalp, when two words come together perfectly. I’m also fond of the idea, that writing occurs - not as a product, but as a process within reading and research. I write when I read. I read when I write.
My working desk at my loft in Copenhagen, where I wrote some of the worst stuff I've ever written.
LLM: Does being a women influence your work ?
NL: I don’t like to imagine that being a woman is a strength, or a force compared to being a man - nor have I experienced the opposite. Perhaps there is what some would call female energies, if you believe in such, which are embodied in all gender/non gender. The intensity of the senses, the flaccidity, the intuitive perception. I feel that is the modus of my writing. But then again, I’m struggling: should that be defined as female force - or simply as force?
LLM: How does love and your romantic perception of life have an influence upon your work?
NL: It’s obvious in my work, that there is a quite explicit and an often addressed “you”, referring to my - or the -lover. Simply because I found that the lover, as an object, as a real person, as a phenomenon, as the living cliché, as a magician, as a fool, as a warrior and as himself is definitely, my favorite object to work with.
The Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal once wrote: Jeg skriver romaner. Jeg er en romantiker.
Translated as I write novels, I am romantic. Look at the similarity between the two words in Norwegian. I don’t think is a coincidence. Novelist are the greatest romantics of our time. And of all times.
Armrest desk at the Krabbesholm library, where you can smell the fjord and listen to the rocks.
LLM: What does having a poetic vision of life mean to you?
NL: When the regular, the customary or the familiar words we use in our everyday life come together and create a new composition. A box of milk, or a wooden bench in a park. When separated objects are set at the same literary scene, creating a new dimension, a pressure, an idea, a scent, a world.
Let me give you an example...
A shopping list:
- tender soft-shelled lemons for cocktails.
- cold pressed oil for my skin
- a chervil plant
- yellow palm tobacco
- blue ink (the one from India, in a glass container)
- Peeled plums in sugar stock
- Wine
- Bread
- Milk
- Red cloves for my lover.
(Ah, there he is again, the lover. Can’t even make a shopping list without involving him)