art horse: Unit 3: Psychogeography

For this project, I drew most of my inspiration from The Ice Palace, a coming-of-age novel by acclaimed Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas. The narrative follows two 11-year-old girls in rural Norway. Siss is popular and outgoing; Unn, who is new to the school, is quiet and shy. The story tells of how the two girls meet and form an intimate bond that is quickly shattered when Unn goes missing on the day they were supposed to meet at the frozen waterfall near their village. I wanted to convey the emotional and physical geography of the book. The setting is presumably the early 60s (the book was published in 1963) and it addresses themes such as femininity, close female friendships, self-perception, fear, self-loathing, popularity, and other issues that are still relevant and provocative today. My main inspiration came from a quote I remembered from the book. The two girls meet at Unn's house, where they undress and have this strange, ambiguous bonding moment:

"Four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking glass. Questions shooting out and then hiding again. I don’t know: gleams and radiance, gleaming from you to me, from me to you, and from me to you alone – into the mirror and out again, and never an answer about what this is, never an explanation. Those pouting red lips of yours, no, they’re mine, how alike! Hair done in the same way, and gleams and radiance. It’s ourselves! We can do nothing about it, it’s as if it comes from another world. The picture begins to waver, flows out to the edges, collects itself, no it doesn’t. It’s a mouth smiling. A mouth from another world. No it isn’t a mouth, it isn’t a smile, nobody knows what it is – it’s only eyelashes open wide above gleams and radiance."

The title of my project, "Gleams and Radiance," is taken from this quote- I constructed a pup tent out of strips of wood molding, a dowel, bedsheets, and a shower curtain. A small hideout, a little escape from the external world seemed the best way to express both intimacy and isolation from the rest of the world. I used items like small, round adhesive mirrors, silver foil paper, and other, reflective objects so that viewers could crawl into the tent and either sit down or lie down and see fragments of themselves. You can look up at yourself and just see a mouth or an eye or hair, without seeing the rest of yourself. In conjunction with the strangeness of the mirrors and reflective surfaces, I chose white floral fabric because it evoked a simpler, sweeter, Old World aesthetic which I think the girls in the story would've had. This is a time way before everything was covered in Hello Kitty and Disney Princesses.