Art project I made In Japan, Nagoya resently. in collaboration with artist Izuru Mizutani, Photograf Yoshiaki Kita and Nawashi Go Arizue. The project is Suported by Danish Arts Foundation Restraint & Release "... When are you in control and when do you have to go with the flow? Are you ever really free, or are more or less invisible strings constantly keeping you in place? Where is the boundary between power and submission?" I have just returned from Japan, where I have had a very intense and exciting artistic stay, supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. I have made a whole new series of works based on the bondage technique Shibari, which I try to incorporate into my own personal experiences and techniques. In doing so, I think I have reached a very experimenting and challenging expression, where the potential, form and significance of the glass merge and take on a new meaning. In Japan, I was given the opportunity to produce experimental glass objects at the Aichi University in Nagoya. I was invited by Professor/Artist Masahiro Sasaki and video artist Izuru Mizutanio. During the course of the project, the photographer Yoshiaki Kita and the well-known bondage artist, Nawashi Go Arizue, joined in as well. A central part of this project was that Go Arizue spent a day tying me up and hanging me from the ceiling in a variety of ways. This was photographed and filmed at the theater where it took place. This artistic research, has resulted in videos, photos and abstract rope/glass objects, that are conceptually connected. The "Restraint and Release" working title of this project goes to the core of what I'm trying to say. Neither as an artist nor as a human being can one ever be in complete control. But being in complete control isn’t important. However, recognizing this basic condition of life, is crucial. The central idea of the collective production of works is – that I, in addition to shaping and dictating my own materials – also become sculptural matter myself. I am quite literally molded myself, and then I bring this experience with me, when it is seemingly me, who are calling the shots. But who and what is controlling what and why, becomes blurry during the whole process. This is what I am trying to show. Being introduced to the Shibari art was for me absolutely essential in this context and gave me a completely new understanding of my own art and materials, and what making sculptures is all about for me. In Europe we often have a very narrow view of Shibari as a sexual expression. But this was not the perspective I got to know in Japan. Here it became a sculptural expression, where the body was the material, and where I had to rethink some basic questions - not just in my art, but in life as such. When are you in control and when do you have to go with the flow? Are you ever really free, or are more or less invisible strings constantly keeping you in place? Where is the boundary between power and submission? My aim is to not only show the finished objects, but also the entire artistic research that preceded them - and in doing so, I am trying to include the viewer in a process, that could have taken me down many different paths. The collective work connects video, rope, and glass sculptures. It all relates to my own body as sculptural matter, Japanese Shibari art and the 7.000 year old Japanese ceramic tradition, Jomon.

I want to examine the conflict between the extreme materialism and fragility which glass represents on one side and the non materialistic and transparent on the other. The ropes out of glass IS a material impossibility. I turned something ­ which normally has the qualities of binding together and flexibility ­ into a very sensitive, breakable almost non existing shape filled with sexual tension and physical and mental paradox. Pink as a color also trigger contradictory associations and emotions, Reactions to pink are determined by one’s cultural background.  In in European civilisation -pink is a “girls color “- color of feminity and kitch, and “ bed taste “. in Japan - every year people contemplate the pink blossoms of the cherry trees and the leaves which, after just a few days, drift like snow to the ground—symbolic for the death of the samurai, who falls in the bloom of youth. some works of this seria are part of the installation i made for Mindcraft18 i-Danish exhibition during Milano Design Week Photo Credit: Kurt Rodahl Hoppe created at VAK. Denmark