MARTHA OSSOWSKA PERSSON - 2015

How did you get into art?
I have always drawn and painted, as an only child it was the best pastime. Even as a child I could disappear into drawing for several hours and somehow always wanted to be an artist. It sounds like a cliché, but it really is. The road to art has taken a few detours via art preparation courses to having studied architecture at Chalmers. When I was studying architecture, a teacher asked me why I didn't go to art college. It was like a kind of signal for me and after that there was no other option but to pursue art.

And how did you then find your direction?
At first I worked quite widely with everything from making photo series, painting and drawing to creating animations. But during my first years at art college, my work began to develop in a different direction and I began to move more and more within painting. There I began to explore the relationship between body and flesh. At first it was in contexts where bodies in different states of mind collided and created interesting poses. In my ongoing process, this happens by examining the hand in different compositions and capturing both conscious and unconscious gestures and touches. In my work, the hand is a representation of the body, a tool of the flesh. What is recurring in my works is the meeting, or a confrontation, for example when flesh meets flesh or when a body "communicates" with another body. In painting, I have found a way to combine it with my own physicality.

What is most important about your creation, to you?
Right now, painting is important. In painting, I try to portray. It's like it's growing in layer after layer of paint in an attempt to evoke space for portrayed bodies to move in. It's like I'm looking for an obviousness in the expression. The size of the paintings is important, as a kind of challenge between me and the paper but also in the meeting between the viewer and the subject. When I paint, I use a lot of water, let the paint flow out uncontrollably in puddles, watch it dry, then move the pigments back and forth. Let it dry again. I process the color layers, wash away, start from the traces that bite into the paper. But the creation is not only about the painting itself, but just as much about the process I enter into and the ideas behind my work. I have always seen myself as a storyteller who tries to challenge myself and different notions that exist around us. For me, it's like the questions I ask myself through painting come out and are tested in the room. Right now I paint women's hands, based on myself as a woman and my way of looking. A kind of inherent curiosity about the bodily landscape and conventions. For me, it's like an ambivalent balancing act where I oscillate between the seductive and beautiful to the fragile and violent, it becomes like a close-up image that in turn becomes an abstraction. That breaking point is very interesting to me and somehow it reinforces the complexity that exists and that we experience in our bodies.