[April 3rd 2003]
Interview


Julie Nord: From wonderland with love (detail)

Interview with Julie Nord
From wonderland with love
Julie Nord graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 2001, and is currently showing at Århus Kunstmuseum with From Wonderland with love, an exhibition that she created in collaboration with the museum’s chief of exhibitions, Gitte Ørskov. Julie Nord’s drawings are part of an installation project that also includes a book by the same name. Nord is also currently exhibiting in Copenhagen at the Mogadishni Leisure Club as part of the group show An Offer You Can’t Refuse. Kopenhagen met Julie Nord for a chat about the Wonderland project.
Interview: Marianne Ilkjær, photo Torben Zenth.

From Wonderland with Love
Julie Nord
17 January - 21 April.
Aarhus Kunstmuseum
Vennelystparken, 8000 Århus C
Tel. +45 86 13 52 55
Open daily 10am-5pm, Wed 10am-8pm, Mon closed
www.aarhuskunstmuseum.dk


Julie Nord: From wonderland with love, installationviews

Your show From wonderland with love is primarily drawings. Why drawings?
I’ve always drawn a lot, but in the beginning, it was just something I did on the side while I was working on my other projects. At the time, drawings were a way of fleshing out my ideas, as sketches or diary entries. I got into the Academy as a painter, and later changed to sculpture and installation, where I started working with video media.

I’ve been working in this medium for quite a while now, and I think that initially it was a reaction to spending so much time in front of the computer, and the amount of time it took to go from idea to object, that made me start drawing again.
For me, that form could create a more immediate way of telling stories. When I started drawing again, it was almost like coming home, and I felt that my ideas became much clearer.

Anyway, I love the line because of its personal nature, or at least that’s how I see it, it’s something that can be difficult to express with other media.
Then there’s also the technique. It’s the hand that leads the pen over the paper; that’s something special. It’s just like with handwriting, it’s something that you just can’t disguise.
The project, From Wonderland with love was, to use a clichéd expression, a kind of ‘dogme’ thing for me; I wanted to find out what it was I wanted to say, what story I wanted to tell. The project grew out of a wish to peel away effects and see what was hiding underneath them. In more concrete terms, I made rules about paper type, size, and exactly what kind of pen I could use.
I had to see what could come out of it – how far I could stretch the idea, working without any kind of technical devices, huge screens or tons of cool colours at my disposal. I wanted to backtrack to pure content.


Julie Nord: From wonderland with love. Click on the image to see it enlarged.

We’re looking at the book that is part of the project From Wonderland with love; why include a book?
In order to achieve the undisturbed, one-to-one experience that a book is so good at creating. The book is more intimate than the drawings on the wall. Ever since I started working on this project, the idea was that a book should be a part of it. It’s two different experiences, seeing the drawings on the wall and then in the book.
When you look at the drawings on the wall, you’re physically navigating the room in order to see them, and you’re creating your own order, your own stream of consciousness. In the book, I deliver the order of the images, and the reader has more time to spend on delving into them. Your head is so close to them. The fact that the book is approximately half the size of the original drawings illuminates the different contexts.

What kind of universe are you depicting in your drawings?
My inspiration comes from the world of fantasy, and from that which is easily recognisable. As far as form is concerned, I’ve been very inspired by Tenniel’s drawings for the original Alice in Wonderland and by classical fantasy illustrations from the same period. I’ve created a sort of cutesy girl world which functions as the point of departure for the stories – I’m interested in portraying a kind of step, a transformation.
What I’m trying to do with all of the drawings is to reach a place where reality slips away, and the difference between reality as we know it and as we think we know it becomes apparent. I’ve started with a theme that’s very well known, a formal language that most people will associate with comfort and security. The fantasy starts in a and ends in z, there are good characters and bad. The fantasy fiction genre has a few rules set in stone, both with regard to narration and morale, which I felt would be interesting to work with. Simply because they’re so accepted, so ingrown.



Julie Nord: From wonderland with love (detail)

How do you show the transformation?
It changes from drawing to drawing. You can more or less describe each of these images as a kind of existential snapshot. Every single drawing is a story in itself, and instead of showing the development of the story, I work with its resolution.
When you start to think that now you’ve figured it out, now you’ve got the point, now you know where the book is headed, that’s where I try to dissolve that possibility of creating a plot line. It’s a sugary sweet, sentimental universe that I am using, and it can seem that maybe it’s all about niceness and goodness and things that you can’t question. But then there’s something about those pictures that pull the rug out from beneath you. Like the text.
Things aren’t what they seem. What if evil became good and good became evil? And what if illusion was actually reality and reality was illusion?
When you first look at the drawings, you’re expecting a specific thing, but what you find is something completely different. My hope is that, of course, the work grabs the viewer – and that it creates an uneasy feeling in them. Not necessarily in a negative way. But more to make it possible to ask these impossible questions, like where does reality end and illusion begin, and vice versa. Especially because there is no concrete transition from the one to the next, despite the fact that we’re all busy trying to convince ourselves and others that it’s there. The thing that interested me about working with drawings was the way it forced me to investigate and experiment with derailing pattern thinking.
As an experiment, to see reality as a mental construct – a series of accepted norms for everything – and to create different angles in an attempt to “terrorise” these constructs. Though hopefully with a sense of love for the way they are, hence the “With love” in the title of the show.

We should also talk a little about the exhibition itself…
Yes, the exhibition is different from the book, because in the book you’re supplied with an automatic order of things. In the exhibition it’s up to the individual viewer where they want to start and where they finish – what the eye focuses on that creates a common denominator. It’s been my desire that the public should be able to physically walk into my work, and the best way to do that was to invite the viewer into a “virginal” white room – on a blank page. That’s the reason the exhibition space has a white carpet.
The white carpet creates a pleasant, contemplative atmosphere. A meditative room of soft peace and quiet, so that people can submerge themselves in the stories that unfold on paper.


Julie Nord: From wonderland with love (detail)

Why is it so important that the public should be able to walk into the work?
It’s important partially because it’s a very demanding work to take in, especially in the context of a museum where there is so much else to see. There are many layers and details in the drawings, figures that repeat from one image to the next, creating new stories and meanings, so I think people should have some time to reflect on that. It was a question of how to make the time available to them.
I tried to do that in collaboration with Gitte Ørskou, to create a separate room from the rest of the museum that allows people to physically enter “something else”. It’s become another world, just like the subject of my inspiration, Alice in Wonderland. To step in to that room and onto the white carpet is not unlike walking into a book, onto the white paper.

But why the protective shoe coverings? What’s wrong with the work bearing signs of the people that have come to see it?
In other works, it would be fine, but here, I don’t think that it’s part of the story. Like I said, there’s a point to this, that you have to move into another world, and if that world is filled with footprints from the inner city, then a new meaning is created; created by the life brought into the room. It would be very interesting in other situations, but not here. The point of this piece is not that people should be leaving something behind.

When I saw the show, it struck me that some of the images are actually a little frightening. On the way home on the train, I showed the book to a friend who couldn’t see the frightening part of the work at all.
It’s funny that you should say that. It’s still a bit of a mystery for me. Within one hour, one person told me that the show was some of the most frightening stuff she’d ever seen, and then there was someone else who said that the drawings were really sweet and that it was nice to finally see work that was about nice and good things.
It’s incredible, but also very cool – there’s a little "Rorschach” in these otherwise very figurative drawings. I’m happy that it’s so individual, what you decide to see, and what it is that you decide to focus your eyes on. It fits in well with my intention of portraying reality as a mental construct – it’s an unusually relative exercise.