On the subject of meaning

My works always starts out from my own experiences and my own translations of them. But by translating them, they become this almost empty or meaningless gesture, because no matter how much I try to translate them visually or through my own experiences, what I felt or what I thought with that experience at that moment, it’s impossible. You have to experience it for yourself. And that’s where I think the senselessness or meaninglessness of these experiences comes in. They have a deep meaning. They are very important to, as Joseph Campbell called, our experience of life. But there is no rational, functional meaning or sense to them, because they’re not technically useful or give you any real applicable skills. They don’t really teach you anything, except about yourself and the world. And to some that might seem like this very silly or obvious thing, or that it’s been done before, there’s no use in repeating them. And I think a very big part of our society doesn’t really think about those things anymore, and they are forgotten, so that’s why I think that I as an artist have tasked myself and give myself a responsibility of keeping these things alive and on the forefront. And I don’t think I am ... we can’t reinvent hot water. A lot of things in the art world have already been done. And I don’t think I’m going to be the one to invent something new, maybe later, you never know that I may grow more intelligent and see things differently and make this break through all of the sudden, I don’t know. But I feel like I am subscribing myself in this tradition which a lot of people throughout the entire history have done. It started out in primitive art. It is the most important thing, this connection to magic what they called back then. To related to themselves in the world, and it was the only thing that they spoke about in connection to there life, in what can be considered divinity. And that was done for a very long time, from the Egyptian culture and Greek and Roman, medieval catholic, up until the Enlightenment. The Renaissance was the first period that really started going in a different direction, with Humanism, but you still see these myths and this deep connection. But now it’s become this sideshow that everybody has seen before, and is maybe obvious, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep it alive. Because, as I believe, a lot of us have forgotten what they talk about. We are always looking for this meaning or what this work of mine means. And I put a lot of meaning in my work, but it also gets lost. So this “it’s ok if we don’t know the meaning, just accept that there is one and enjoy is” is very important for me.