After-images

Inghild Karlsen's two-part sculpture with its shifting meanings can be situated in several fields of reference. Its visual form is taken from everyday life and has its starting-point in the type of street lamp commonly used in the area. This shape borrowed from the everyday has then been translated into the language of stone and sculpture.

The sculpture is a lamp, its constant light nearly invisible in the brightness of the northern summer, and highly visible as a source of light during the winter darkness, when it is hard to tell the difference between night and day. The lamp takes its shape from that of a woman's face, from any woman's face.

The sculptures have been sited in two different places - one is in the community's centre, in a little park where the lamppost casts its shadow onto the surrounding earth. The other is in an area that resembles the end of the world, a fishing community abandoned in the 1960's and 1970's, now almost uninhabited and left to decay. In this setting, time seems to go backwards. Here, the sculpture has been placed beside a sea basin, amid the abandoned houses with their bright, optimistic but weather-beaten colours. The sculpture casts its shadow over the surface of the basin. A link, a connection, a line of contact is created between what has been, what is, and what is to be.

Maaretta Jaukkuri