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With breath, pulse, and traces as artistic means Janicke Iversen Lise Bjørne's art moves freely between various different media: drawings, objects and photography as well as installations, textile works and artist books. The reason why she has such a fluid relationship to her choice of techniques and materials is because the driving force behind her work is the actual theme and ideas behind them. The choice of medium is therefore a secondary consideration and arises more as a natural consequence than as a result of a definite attitude to genre. The theme of Bjørne's oeuvre is based on an investigation into the body and its contact with its surroundings. Elements such as breath, pulse rhythms, traces and touch are essential when interpreting the individual works and can also be regarded as the foundation of her artistic oeuvre as a whole. Bjørne's art has a simple, direct and sensuous idiom, often based on repetitive patterns of action and a homogeneous use of materials within each individual project. A distinctive feature of Bjørne's art is the use of her own body as a tool and artistic effect. The result is a vulnerable and intimate artistic expression that nevertheless avoids being private. Bjørne's artistic intentions are most clearly expressed in her series of "breath works" Breath Rayographs, inspired by the American DADA artist Man Ray's photographic technique, developed in 1919. The photographs are produced directly in the darkroom, without the use of a camera, by Bjørne's action of breathing and shouting into ash. The ash is physically blown over light-sensitive paper and the result is developed by means of the conventional procedure used for black-and-white photographs. The photographs, which are in 1:1 format, show traces of her body and the working process; her hands, knees and mouth can be seen as empty, dark contours where the ash has been prevented from further movement by these physical obstacles. In these works, Bjørne aims to reflect her feelings by "capturing" her breath and the power and volume of her shouting. Part of this concept also forms the basis of Breath Drawings, in which Bjørne blows ash onto white paper. As in Breath Rayographs, these ash-blown "drawings" comprise investigations into how breathing is connected to feelings: anger results in intense and rapid breathing, while a feeling of security produces gentle breathing and fear makes us hold our breath. In Bjørne's own words: "Breathing is a sign of life and the "breath drawings" are markers of moments in time – a visualisation of the body's emotional reactions and mental presence". When the paper is hung up, some of the loose ash falls down on to the floor, where it lies as evidence of the physical process that has gone before. The ash on the floor can be perceived as a crumbling of the work and introduces an aspect of ephemerality that contrasts life with death and unity with fragmentation. Like breath, the pulse is also a reminder of moments in time. As a sign of life-giving energy, the pulse rate is closely linked to our feelings, and particularly to the consciousness of our own existence. In Pulse Drawings, Bjørne uses her own body as an artistic tool as she investigates the intense presence that arises from feeling her pulse. The pulse drawings gradually emerge over a long and ritualised period of time. Every day, when Bjørne arrives at her studio, she dips two fingers into some fingerprint dust and places them on the pulse of her wrist. The resulting imprints are transferred to mylar paper that hangs from the ceiling to the floor. Gradually, during the year, the paper is covered: she labels each imprint with the date, time, pulse rate and the thought she had while taking her pulse. Bjørne perceives this presence as something intimate but at the same time universally valid. She is not interested in a linear experience of time but looks on each individual imprint as a marker of a particular moment. The imprints are therefore positioned at random and together create an experience of time and duration - an abstract phenomenon. The installation Twentytwothousandeighthundredandsixtyseven again investigates the theme of the body and its imprints or traces. The breath and pulse drawings are created with the help of the artist's own body as a tool, while it is "traces" of other people that form the point of departure for this work. The title refers to 22,867 used acupuncture needles hanging from ceiling to floor on thin, mobile fishing lines. The needles can be perceived as threatening or energising and are bearers of invisible narratives linked to for example traces of DNA, Eastern philosophy and medical traditions. The installation has a dialectic function that emerges from a number of parameters: the work points for instance to the relationship between mass and volume, visual transparency and physical impenetrability, lightness and heaviness, movement and immobility, light and shade. These different dichotomies imbue the needle installation with fields of tension that arouse in the observer both a visual, sense-related reaction and an intellectual, narrative interpretation. Bjørne's interest in the traces of other people is also in evidence in the installation Desconocida Unknown Ukjent. This work is a reaction to the critical situation in the Mexican town of Juárez, where more than 400 women have been tortured, raped or murdered over the last 12 years and additional hundreds have disappeared. Several artists have been invited to reflect on this situation and Bjørne's contribution is a work in which the names of all the killed and missing women are embroidered onto hundreds of small patches. The work is process-orientated in that the name patches are embroidered by small groups of women spread over large parts of the world. In addition to its strong, symbolic function, whereby women’s traces are crossing in the embroidery of the others names, the installation also has a political message with a sting in its tail, as it places the emancipation of women on the agenda in an international perspective. But Bjørne is not only interested in physical and body-related traces. In the work Detach-Attach, it is rather traces in the form of remnants from her earlier and rejected drawings that are in focus. She has censured these drawings herself, torn them into shreds and then thread them onto thin wires hanging from the ceiling to the floor. The work is thus personal and an expression of vulnerability, since the artist is exposing her strict censorship of her own works. The pieces of paper create striking shadows against the wall and introduce elements of movement, time and space into the work. The fragments of paper also communicate symbols of ephemerality in which the creation, existence and disintegration of a work of art can be regarded as a metaphor for the essence of life. In the context of art history, Bjørne's oeuvre can be considered in the light of several contemporary and older artists who express similar issues relating to content and form. One example is the English artist Cornelia Parker's (1956-) reconstruction of an exploded garden shed, Cold Dark Matter, an Exploded View (1991) , which can be linked to Bjørne's recycling of her own, deconstructed drawings in Detach-Attach. Parker and Bjørne reveal in these two works their common interest in a theme and a medium, in which a deconstructed, richly symbolic and destructive idiom is a key component. The English Young British Artist Rachel Whitereads (1963-) should also be mentioned, since her negative casts of room-size, architectural elements and everyday objects are related to Bjørne's interest in imprints, traces and time. In Whitereads' work House (1993-94), she has made a plaster cast of the inside of a Victorian house. The sculpture is a direct impression which figuratively speaking tells stories of lived lives and human presences and fates. In Bjørne's works, similar themes can be discerned in the needle installation Twentytwothousandeighthundredandsixtyseven and in the embroidered patches of Desconocida Unknown Ukjent. Whitereads' concept can also be related to Bjørne's breath and pulse works, though less directly. Going back a little in time, there are links between Bjørne and
the American artist Eva Hesse's (1936-1970) postminimalist ideas in the
1960s. For instance, Bjørne's reductive metal works, Counting and
Coming and Going, in which thin steel wires spring directly out of a wall,
can be seen to be related to Hesse's ideas and formal artistic effects,
often described as "eccentric abstraction". Both Hesse and Bjørne
have developed a repetitive idiom based on a simple use of colours and
untraditional effects. The themes of both their oeuvres involve an investigation
into the human being, where the physical and psychological sensuousness
of the body is continually exposed to a confrontation with life and the
environment. Virginia Button, The Turner Prize, Twenty Years, p.140, Tate Publishing
Ltd, London, 2003.
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