up the hill, over the city

This is the Gamle Aker Kirke, the church where my great, great grandparents were married. It is a severe building positioned on a hill above central Oslo, with a beautiful cemetery attached. The late spring evening I visited here with my parents it was almost silent. There was no sense of being in a city at all. There were purple flowers in the trees around the church and occasional birdsong. The church was built here in the eleventh century and it is Oslo’s oldest surviving building. It was originally a basilica in the Roman style. Frederick Martinsen (later known as Pedersen) and Anne Lovisa Iversdatter married here on 28 April 1871, only 10 days after Anne Lovisa registered as emigrating from the parish of Aremark and a mere 18 days before leaving Hamburg for Australia on the Lammershagen. She was 6 years older than him. When you assemble the genealogical data on individuals there are always fascinating gaps and mysteries. This is the addictive element of the research. Standing on the top of the Telthusbakken hill on a beautiful, fine and mild evening, I try to imagine them coming to the church to marry. He was a cork cutter and I assume she had been a farm servant girl. But I cannot know how they met, how they decided to marry and emigrate together or how they decided upon Queensland as their destination. What struck me most about the church grounds was how richly green everything was. This whole part of the world seems to have an astounding wealth of water. What a shock it must have been for them. Anne Lovisa had expressed her intention to leave Aremark for Amerika, but instead she would end up in Aramac.

the erratic nature of research

The difficulty for me about keeping this blog is the erratic nature of research. Previously, I have allowed projects to develop before presenting a single work derived from the chaos of my findings at the end. This creates the impression of a coherent, linear research and development process where artworks emerge fully formed and complete. From an art career perspective this is preferable because it conforms to all sorts of beliefs about the artist's vision - and it hides errors, imperfect tangents and the like. From my perspective as a researcher, this is a nonsense camouflage and actually does insult to the very thing I love about these projects: the complications, the false turns and dead ends.

So here it all is, laid out for scrutiny and comment. It is frightening and thrilling to be contravening all the lessons I was taught about protecting your brand as an artist. Perhaps it signifies my final farewell to the illusion that one day I will 'straighten up and fly right', produce stand alone artworks that can sit proudly in a gallery with a price tag! Instead I'm enjoying Bill Brown's discussion of 'Thingness' in his article on Virginia Woolf's short story, "Solid Objects", published in 1920. There is a proposition that the misuse of an object can allow us to experience it in its specificity or can allow us to appreciate its individual features anew. This is a happy echo of the misuse of wooden finials I have been working on with my father. [Brown, B. (1999) The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism), Modernism/Modernity 6.2, pp.1-28]