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RE-flower VI, 2014

Plants and metal.
When I say plants, I had hoped to be able to say flowers. I thought it was flowers. But a little Google searching revealed that it was plants on plants, red algae on a host: Red algae, macro-algae or just seaweed.

Life, both the casual and the sublime version, is full of this kind of misassumptions and derived fallacies.

But it is metal.
When I go by plane, and therefore have to go through the security check that followed Nine Eleven, I am always getting special attention: Friendly, but attentive. It’s probably not that common to see this scale of internal metal and implants.

All that metal was not planned.
During the process I needed something to hold the plants, and in the kitchen I found a piece of bent steel wire. A piece used by my family to secure the apartment, to keep the key in the door to the back stairs from being pushed in from the outside, when we are away for a longer period, – a kind of theft protection.

Nor were the red algae planned.
I am by the sea almost every day. I am on the water several times a week. I grew up by the sea. And one day at the beach in all the washed up seaweed I saw something purple. I had seen it before, as one sees so much. But over a few days it became an asset. In my mind I saw some monochrome purple images.

This is often how it starts. An idea catches a resonance, and a desire is awakened. I had an idea of ​​monochromes and the colour purple. From there starts a process, which may be more or less bumpy.

When I saw the first take, I felt uncomfortable. I felt bad, and the night was restless. But over the following days normalization occurred.
It must be mentioned that I am familiar with abrupt nights.

Now I like them – ambivalent, but no more complex than what is known from other contexts of loving.
They are simple and beautiful, but if you want to you can also find the story of the bent nail that has been straightened. And the many coincidences of Life.

There is a line from this series back to series like RE-weed, RE-rokke, Roots and RE-vival, but I can look back all the way to the Stone series (1995) and the Crane video from 1993.

Reference in English: http://www.janskovgard.dk/pdf/RE-flower6.pdf

February 6, 2014
Jan Skovgård