This image is typical of the photographic and video work I was making at the commencement of my research. It takes as its starting point the prevailing, “found” circumstances at a physical site, in this case a recently vacated apartment on Nygardsgaten in Bergen, and artefacts which both bear the traces of the departed occupant's activities and which seem to recall their presence. Here the bedding recalls the presence of the now absent body that no longer occupies the room, but also suggests a different interplay of absence and presence: that found in the preparation of the dead body for mortuary rights.
The work is evidential, but it is not clear to what that evidence may point. The image seems to capture a moment of stasis or hiatus between events: specifically, between the coming and going of the room’s occupants. The viewer is confronted with a moment which both offers a record of past events and portends others to come.
The presence of the body, manifest in many ways, as a focus for the relationships that exist at different sites, continues to be an important factor in the relationships which my work explores.