Parallel lives
I Could Wrap My Arms Around It
Sandra Norrbin
Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, 6 mars – 6 april 2008

Sandra's abstract diary in landscape format is here. A big, fat feeling fills the room. It is grey, soft and overflowing. It lives its own life: came into existence in the dawn light; a landslide solidified. Without a thought that it would be seen by anyone, it just swelled—there in its nakedness. Yes, there's something exposed about it. But it's not embarrassed. It's rather that we are embarrassed by its—to say the least—bold appearance. Where it came from and where it's going no one knows. It just is, solidified in the midst of motion. Think that this is only a single frame in a long film—and then imagine to yourself how the whole film must look!

Here there are two clear opposing forces: to hold together and to fall apart. From at first being able to wrap one's arms around it and then to let go completely. A totally uninhibited collision. Everything burst—yet continues. Is it going to embrace or suffocate us? At first glance it can look cosy; one might perhaps like to cast oneself into the mounds and roll around, but one is checked by something, because from inside the avalanche of grey matting, from all the layers that lie in strata over one another, and maybe, above all, from between the layers, comes a suffocation creeping over us. Those grey, recycled textile fibres dampen and isolate both good and evil. It strikes me that they are in fact produced to enwrap people—except in a somewhat different way from here in the gallery. Maybe it's the building itself that thought, "What the hell?" Turned inside out—showing everything that ought not to be shown—all that which we squeeze into the walls and brush under the floor instead of that which fills the room now.

Yes, abstract diary I wrote. Much of Sandra's time goes towards planning and constructing. Then she has often only a short time in which to complete the work, to really do it. And it is then that it happens. It is a kind of performance that she sometime does alone, sometimes with assistants who drive the truck or climb up scaffolding. What I mean is that she is faithful the day she does it. Rarely redoes it, undoes it or corrects it. Works directly and entrusts herself to the moment, trusts that every choice is right. When one works so instinctively one gives so much of oneself, one charges the work with the day's spectrum of mental states. Sandra has a quotation in her studio: "If we tell something which is of sufficient personal importance, it becomes universally true." Exactly.

In parallel with our ordinary day-to-day life, a sort of abstract life goes on. All we usually know of it is if we remember something of the night's dreams. But it goes on during the daytime too, for all of us, the whole day long, all around us, all the time, constantly, always.

When I was little I had a recurring dream that consisted of something that I cannot describe more closely than to say that it was like a kind of consistency. I dreamed a consistency. Now it is a long time since I had that dream, but it turns up often as a memory when I see Sandra's installations.

© Märit Aronsson, Trondheim February 2008
Translated by Paul Parker