Interview with visual artist Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen
Published March 2019
You work with different medias and techniques, but are best known for your text works. Could you explain a little about the background for your method of using and integrating text in visual art?
I write texts, poems and aphorisms. In visual art these can have a visual expression through context, placement and design.
You have worked both with objects, installations, paintings and assemblage, with and without words. What do you work with at the moment?
At the moment I prepare the art project WORD and PLACE (www.ordogsted) together with Karen Helga Maurstig, I also work with an outdoor installation, and I'm part of a book project with three other artists and an architect.
The meaning and use of single words and expressions is essential in your works. Where would you place your main focus, does it regard the visual, the linguistic or does it regard the combination of the two?
My main focus is in the symbiosis of the linguistic and the visual, the meaning they form together.
Do you have a political motivation that form the base of your artistic practice?
More than that I would consider it to be an existential motivation, even though some of my works may be political, for instance "si det er havet" ("say it is the ocean"), an installation containing, among other elements, sea water from Førdefjorden.
Could you say something about the way you initialize your work with a site specific installation?
I start with the site. I write texts for it, I also search in my existing text works, I process, I rewrite. I look for words and parts of sentences that can find new meanings at this spesific site. I also aim to visually facilitate the meanings I want to step forward.
Do you have a preferance for making site spesific works compared to working in traditional gallery rooms?
I prefer to make site spesific works. But I also find the combination of the two to be interesting, as was the case with my work «#3_2016», exhibited at Vestlandsutstillingen 2017.
Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen graduated from the Bergen National Academy of Art, (now titled University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design), department of Fine Arts in 2002. Her art works have been exhibited in different arenas, such as Hordaland Art Centre, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela and Bjørgvin Prison.
Photo documentation published with permission of the artist. Photo documentation ©️ Aud Marit Skarrebo Holmen