Poking the unknown with a really long stick

Welcome Stranger (NL), 2020

Since the ‘90s Welcome Stranger has focused on the private home as a setting for art and as impromptu exhibition spaces.

For the project I made works partially visible from the street looking up the north window of my atelier home. The works themselves deal with notions of the obscured, the hidden and the disguised, as the sculptures are merely partially glanced sticking out of an open window. Along with an accompanying text in the form of a leaflet handout hanging by the sidewalk, and a set of three recorded online performances.

In the Icelandic folktale “The Father Of Eighteen Elves” a mother suspecting her child to be a changeling arranges before it a sculpture, something it would have never seen before, in order to trick it into its true form. I read the story as an instance of ekphrasis in oral tradition. I speak with my friend, artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson. Upon hearing my plans he tells me that he made his own reproduction of the sculpture in the ‘70s, when he was my age, but he assures me that it went undocumented and forgotten by everyone and so I reproduce it again, reflecting the cyclical nature of folktales to be retold.