Excerpts from Kamilla Sajetz Mathisen’s Diary While Preparing for This Exhibit—Svevn, Kraft Gallery, Bergen, Norway—as Written by Dina Hardy, Who Lives 3,253 km from Kamilla and Her Studio and Who Knows Very Little of Her Process
7 January 2019: If a train leaves a station, and passes a landscape of green and suddenness, at the same time a road disappears into a curve of
river, will my hands decay at the same rate as twigs forgotten
on the forest floor in fall?
9 January 2019: Baking clay is an exercise in fetishizing the fragile—but don’t be fooled, lest you become the fool.
10 January 2019: Do not put bunnies in water.
11 January 2019: Sleep and snow have become the same.
12 January 2019: Scissors and twine are food to feed the feminine. Epoxy and wood shavings feed the masculine. Which half hungry?
14 January 2019: The candles at half-mast form dovecotes for the wicks. Solid wax: a fortress around the city. Liquid wax: a moat. If attacked, offer the warriors bread the size of your hand. Offer them your hands. Offer
to warm their hands in the heat of your hands. Hold hands until all weapons are washed into the sea.
17 January 2019: Have you heard the joke about the Interrupting Starfish? It’s a joke only told in person. Do not try it over the phone. First, ask someone
if they’ve heard the joke about the Interrupting Starfish. Before they can finish the single syllable of, No, clasp your palm over their mouth:
this is the Interrupting Starfish.
19 January 2019: A starfish to the forehead is the joke gone wrong. The listener moved.
22 January 2019: Open the lid and reach for the hand that reaches for you.
25 January 2019: Light keeps time at the edge of a river while the river keeps light at the edge of time. The kitchen table is for creation.
28 January 2019: A baby inside a womb inside a woman inside a coffer inside a kiln, which is a tomb. Resurrection. Now they are inside a vault.
31 January 2019: Sleep is subjective.
*
Kamilla Sajetz Mathisen was born in the Natural History of Projection & Bone. She built her home in arctic mammoth tusks. To mark the entrance, she placed a raised arm at the edge of the water in the wood. In the hand, a bouquet of three red balloons. The water never freezes, but the balloons change color with the seasons. Take note not to trip over the walking stick stuck in the center of her dining room, or its shadow she’s painted on the floor. This is her sundial, how she knows when to eat. Before each meal, she closes her eyes in remembrance, & her body becomes full of need. Crystals form on the ceiling, her food. Once, in the future, she knew she would remember this harvest. Once, she gathered gravity in her skirt.
*
Kamilla Sajetz Mathisen works with the accident of soil, flame, and time. She makes villages by hand, but the roads are cut by winds dressed in fine grain vestments, and the sky tells her stories that unfold under illogical clouds. Elsewhere is not here, but this is the address she’ll give you. Don’t assume the train arrives at midnight. As Mathisen searches graveyards of landscapes, her figures shatter the fragility of nostalgia. The spectacle of context and container vaults viewers into an infinite fracturing of finite fields, such as: sea, breath, deep, drama, and meadows in dreams.
*
To deal, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we endure
The heartland and the thousand natural shoes
That flews is heirloom to—’tis a consumable
Devoutly to be wished! To deal, to sleep.
To sleep, percher, to dream—ay, there’s the rubble,
For in that sleep of dears what drearies may come
When well have shuffled off this mortal coin,
Must give us paupers. There’s the respite
That makes calamari of so long strife.
*
You wake on a train passing an open field. Feel the rattle of wheels on the rails. See the rows of wheat out the window. Rows that form roads between. Open the window, crawl out. Or, better: break the glass with your fingertip. You can. Nothing is real—not even the sound of breaking glass, but isn’t that a glorious sound. Escape—inside to out. Meet me beneath that bail of hay over there. Here we are. Just like that. The bails are rolled like cigars. Go ahead, pick one up. Smoke it. It fits perfectly in your fingers. Size is relative and relations can be altered. Pluck the flame from the sun. Didn’t know you could do that, did you? You can do anything as emphatically as crows—like that collection across the expanse of blue, above the trees, above the wheat, above the field, beside the train, above its wheels, on the tracks to sleep.
Dina Hardy, 2019