Laughter is a purling, an echo, a chaplet,
a state and an act
Laughter starts from within and rises to the surface
Laughter is so simple and so complicated
Laughter can be light and laughter can be dark
– How does one embody laughter in all its complexity?
With the help of pencil, graphite, eraser, the paper and the process itself, I’ve been attempting to embody laughter. The act of drawing, erasing and drawing again, has been a way for me to embody the on-going in laughter. It is not about showing the process towards a finished drawing – it is about using the drawing process figuratively. Variations and repetitions are not a search towards a final result, but an attempt to catch laughter transpiring over time. I wanted to find out if I could – in one and the same piece of art – depict laughter as a process with its own course of duration.
I drew five different laughters on five pieces of paper, each measuring 130 x 100 cm during five weeks while at the same time documenting the drawing process photographically. Every Monday I started on a new laughter and then I drew and erased, drew and erased, drew and erased, for a week – and on Fridays I stopped. Each drawing process resulted in roughly one hundred photos in shifting daylight. The fifth and last drawing turned out as totally uninteresting during its whole process and eventually I finished by covering it up with white paint – to me it didn’t do as a work of art in any way. The four series of photographs became “Days of laughter I – IV” and exist in the form of projections (animations) and as four unique Artist Books collected in a slip-cover.