Camila Nielsen
![[kat.10.1] Isflager I](art/10-1.jpg)
[kat.10.1] Lys for en Ven
af Vanessa Paschakarnis, Halifax Canada
One never knows enough.
The known
Carries in itself
The unknown
Eduardo Chillida
Camilla Nielsen does not pretend that she can give you an answer with her work. Her work confirms the fact that the mysteries of natural forms do not unravel in front of us, do not entirely unfold, do not open up for a scientific explanation, but keep enclosing yet another mystery that makes life worth living.
The open pages in a book are cast in bronze, made form, revealing as they are part of a continuous presence, letters turned literally into an explanation of form, a visceral reading, a reading for the blind.
Camilla Nielsen work with the mussel shell as source material. Her mussel shells are generally hand-size and worked in a variety of materials like paper, plastics, aluminium, bronze. Transformed through scale and material, the image of the mussel shell becomes a metaphor for the natural forces, the potential of growth, the element of water as an environment for life, fertility as a force and the continuity of life as witnessed by the life form that is influenced by the forces of the moon.
Camilla Nielsen takes this form and combines it over and over in seemingly endless combinations, always a little different, always precisely finished, always placed to be encountered through the recognizable image of the shell. They become elements of the human, like hands folded, propped on stands, learning on each other in a protective circle, one to one, and finally as seemingly disintegrating in their materiality.
In other series of work, Camilla Nielsen combines the form of the shell with the stone shaped as counterbalancing elements. Here, the shell symbolizes the living as opposed to the mineral and the pieces bear a richness that reminds of the artist's background in painting. Composed and finished to work as an entity, dark planes, polished rich surfaces inform as a metaphor for life as a circle of giving and taking.
In Art as Experience, John Dewey states: "The distinguishing contribution of man is consciousness of the relations found in nature. Through consciousness, he converts the relations of cause and effect that are found in nature into relations of means and consequence. […] The intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition. Thus it varies the arts without end. But its intervention also leads in time to the idea of art as a conscious idea - the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity." Camilla Nielsen relies on these forces of being human and being conscious. Her work are meant to be experiences as a passage, a recollecting of notions that inform us about our past and present as human beings, trying to find a common thread.
Another image that is reoccurring in her work is the "mother" - an abstracted woman form inspired by the fertility figure, an artefact from prehistoric times. Just like the mussel form, she reinvents and rescales this image and transforms it into an object. Cast in series out of bronze or aluminium they confirm the same search for the unknown powers of nature that the artist explored through the use of the shell. They hint towards the idea of governing forces that remind us that we are part of something bigger, a world that we share. Transformed into masks, these shapes of the mother becomes faces, means of looking, shells, for the face that does not know - enough - but is driven to ask.
T.S. Elliot closes his essay on Tradition and individual Talent (Collected Essays) with the following paragraph: "The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet [artist] cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."
The recent works by Camilla Nielsen are fruits of a developing voice that speaks about this kind of immersion. It is a definition of art as a language, and life as the reason why we desire to engage with these objects. There richness grasps you as a confirmation of the power of two hands closing, to sides of a shell sealing the potential of the unknown.