COLLECTIVE 10

VIDLE J. ROLFSEN

Collective focus on the artistic process of one emerging artist; we learn about their sculptural practice and how it relates to construction, deconstruction, or both. Questions by Joanna Cresswell.

Tell us about your process. What reference or influence (if any) do you take from other mediums? When I started doing still lives I was concerned with consumerism, capitalism, gender and waste in general. During this process I did a lot of research, and then it turned into an interest and the research slowly became part of my everyday life. So my process now is just taking in everything, taking notes and then when it comes to the day of shooting I kind of just work with the flow. I never plan a shoot down to detail, I just bring my box of stuff which I have collected over the years, and start photographing. I am influenced and inspired by everything from weird human behaviour to wasteland to my neighbours' rubbish. I get the more technical influences from other still life photographers. I would say my photography is playful with a serious message.

Are these pictures concerned with exploring formal and aesthetical interests – studies of form, colour, movement, how things work together, or are they representational, metaphorical? What is the weight that holds these pictures together? I never like to put propaganda up in people’s faces, it never works. But when you photograph a plastic bag in a beautiful and intriguing way, or a paper cup or food, it becomes interesting, and I think the moment the viewer realise the message of the photograph is the most important moment in this process.

Are you a photographer or an artist using photography? I am an artist using photography.

Does your work reflect on the medium of photography or the photographic image? If so, is that intentional? I feel like I use the camera and the equipment of photography in a way that reflect the medium. Not sure in what way, but I don’t think my images would be as strong if they where painted, the fact that I use the camera, which is a new medium within art, is quite fitting for what I do regarding consumerism etc.

Typically, are your works more about construction or deconstruction? Both! I construct the image in order to deconstruct ‘the everyday’.

Are you interested in the notion of your pictures as objects? Do you think about how their physicality may endure as you are photographing them or is that an afterthought? Yes I like to think of my images as objects. This is very much ‘there’ when I photograph. I often think about how I would exhibit them, and I think it would be fantastic to exhibit the objects/sculptures/sets I photograph as sculptures. Maybe also without the image there? In this way the viewer would be in control of how she or he views it.

Often sculptural photographic works are concerned with elevating banal objects, situations or events to a status of ‘art’ – when does something become art for you? For me, something becomes art when I feel the need to question it, disagree with it or hate it. But also when I can just sit back, and look at something so beautiful that no words can describe it.