To nye kunstverk i kunstparken på KHMessen i Ålvik
Kunstnerne
Vardi Bobrow
Felieke van der Leest
Vardi Bobrow
CREATIVE – Language Beyond Words
A work follows the shape of a sail from which eight maritime signal flags are connected, spelling the word CREATIVE.
Inspired by its surroundings — The KHMessen ArtPark, Adjacent to the artist residency building, The port and dock, The Norwegian mythology maritime culture, and the international code flags (a visual language used since 1857).
Vardi Bobrow
https://www.vardibobrow.com/
The elusive creative process, at least the part I can describe, nearly always begins for me following a reading of canonical texts from literature and philosophy, scientific research articles, or images from science, especially the aesthetics revealed through the microscope. These are what generate my artworks, as each beginning of a new work is the outcome of a continuous quest.
Over the past few years, I have been working with readymades and found materials, whose common denominator is simplicity, ordinariness, functionality, and lack of aura: synthetic and metallic materials, such as industrial bristle fibers and wires, or rubber bands used in offices. These are the basic elements of my artworks.
The fact that they are not unique enables me to create dialectics between their practical use, so familiar and well-known, and between their use as the main components of an artwork. For example, rubber bands resonate the practical nature of an organization, with its orderliness and clerical banality, while I charge them with the added symbolism of their embodied elasticity, round shape, and being a link in a chain. This reveals its ambivalence: if we examine the limits of its elasticity, it will break, lose its ability to function, and will strike back at us in a whipping motion.
Felieke van der Leest
The idea of a yellow penguin standing at a 90-degree angle in a tree came to me when listening to a jazz concert at Kabuso Art Centre in my hometown Øystese.
At first, I wanted to crochet everything, since that is my favourite jewellery making technique. But since that would take too much time and physical strength, I had to change that. Instead, I used for the large surfaces PVC canvas that I zigzagged with cord through metal rings onto the steel frame.
I did crochet the eyes, beak and feet though, and since it has two front sides you are saluted both ways.
Felieke van der Leest
https://www.feliekevanderleest.com/
Felieke van der Leest is a jewelry artist based in Hardanger. She combines textiles and textile techniques with precious metals, miniature plastic toy animals and various other materials.
Aside from the obvious humor in her work, one sometimes also finds an unexpectedly serious side; contemporary themes such as the environment, our treatment of animals and all kinds of social problems are touched upon.
