Birgitte Lund -Artist Statement
Archeological Pictorial Landscapes – by Birgitte Lund
The medium is painting and I work in series.
My work revolves around the discovery of pictorial landscapes – like an archeologist uncovering but in reverse order.
The landscapes are built up through many textured layers. Tracks are left behind on absorbent or repellent surfaces. Lines, marks, calcified figures from my graphical sketches, drawings and earlier works form landmarks on the surface.
Materials such as cement, fluid rubber, chalk, and shellac are used to lay a grid of expressive tracks. Forms and figures are often covered, revealed and then minimized again, before being emphasized, transformed and made solid. This grid of fragmented stories and implied figures is what I call the pictorial, archeological landscape.
When the landscape of each picture is fully “dis-excavated”, color takes over. The final color composition is built-up from many layers of glazing – in some places transparent to emphasize the underlying story and in other areas covered, powerful and dominant. The “skeleton story” in the landscape of the picture is fused together with color, which acts as the body to merge the many layers into one.
Psychedelic Landscapes and The Relief of Horizontal Lines are two themes that I have worked with since 2006. A two-year period in New York City provided the inspiration and fascination for dividing the surface into horizontal lines and compose landscape paintings.
In New York I was inspired, fascinated, captivated and overwhelmed by the bombardment of vertical lines. I found myself longing for and often seeking natural, flat (and homely) experiences, which led to the prevalence of powerful horizontal lines in my work.
My paintings are devised as serial building blocks that can be combined together to complement a space. The elements multiply into a larger work, that flows horizontally and vertically according to the shape and expression of the room.
Singularly or together the works manifest as a pictorial landscape into which the viewer enters. A landscape that can both appeal to the viewer’s own “stories”, and “play with” the specific space the paintings are hanging in.
