Traintracks and Ladders, Woven cotton, 2021
While hiking along old abandoned traintracks on my home island, a thin stretched out piece of semi-abandoned land in the southern funen achipelago, a thought got stuck in my head. Somehow traintracks and ladders are a bit the same the thing. Both inherently directional beings that exist as two long, most often, paralel lines, connected by shorter, much more frequently repeated, paralel lines. And somehow both seem to belong mainly in my memories of childhood. Why I’m not sure, but the thought was repeated when the lingering feeling of ”sameness” stuck and moved down into my fingers, where they repeated themselves in childlike drawings. A lot of them. And then the need felt bigger, to make it somehow more permanent and repeated again and again.
I think it has something to do with lost traces. Or maybe tracing. Memories feel alot like tracing a drawing that’s quite difficult to see through the paper. Where bits a missing from view, so you just kinda guess. An educated guess sure, but still just a guess. Then you see the image and the finaldrawing side by side, and realise your mistake. Only with memories you never get the overview, and when others disagreee, usually you’ll just assume their wrong.
It’s a bit like telling a story, a memory, in a second language. Yeah sure the main bits get across, but some things just feel off. Like you can’t achieve full truth- it’s just not the same. For some things it doesn’t matter, might even sound kinda good in English, but for some things it feels misplaced (malpaceret) and plain wrong.
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This obsession has taken shape in two ways. Through woven images, mainly the same, but slightly diffenrent. And stories that are close to the truth, closer than most memories as they exist in the language they happened in when neccesary, but still removed- but just the prospect of being a memory. Stories that have nothing directly to do with neither traintracs or ladders, but that is still what we call them.
