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"Stepping Out"
His art slides in and out of the shadows,
frightening and enticing at the same time. Nigel Benson meets
Olav Nielsen.
Olav Nielsen looks down into a latte bowl, seeing what only
he can see.
"Real is what you perceive it to be. Memory is often every
bit as ethereal as dreams," he muses.
"I like to merge the two. My artwork is a kind of fusion of
night-time realities and daytime realities. A blend of dreams
and what I see in the waking world. It's an integrated space
of the realities of my life."
It is a space carved from experiences both real and imagined.
A personal history deconstructed and reassembled in a way
that makes sense.
"We all carry a dream world in our heads all of the time and
life is about how we interact with those worlds," he says.
Nielsen reveals six new works in his latest exhibition,
"Familiars", at the Artist's Room this week.
The works are all one-offs and unique in that the original
artist plate is presented alongside the print.
Night and day. Positive and negative. Yin and yang.
"It was partly a practical evolution and partly a conceptual
one, in that making a plate is part of the process," Nielsen
says.
"Traditionally, plates were used to run off a series of
prints and never shown. But plates are beautiful artworks in
themselves. The line between the two is becoming increasingly
important in my work. That point of interaction is where the
real intensity happens.
"In doing both, you present a dual reality of daytime events
and vice versa. There's a duality and mutual reflection.
One's tonal and one's colour.
"I guess we view everything by contrast. We have a real world
and we have an unreal world, as well."
Much of Nielsen's work appears etched by a ghostly hand
scribing in a dream world.
"I've been documenting my dreams in a diary for the past 13
years. It's become an essential part of my creative life. I
started the diary when I was 18, just after I left school. I
don't do it every day, but dreams I can't forget and their
colour, feeling and detail find their way into my artwork.
"The themes and imagery in my work are a blending of dreams
and the places and spaces of my everyday life. The works are
a kind of conversation space, where I can explore my internal
dynamics through light and shadow. They have a mood of
emerging out of the darkness. I often merge them with what I
see around me."
Nielsen (31) was born in Silkeborg, Denmark, and emigrated to
Dunedin with his family in 1990, when he was 12.
He
graduated from the Otago Polytechnic School of Art with a
bachelor of fine arts degree in 2000, majoring in
printmaking.
He then travelled around Europe and east Asia, before
returning to Dunedin to set up his studio in 2003.
Art has been a portal through which Nielsen has explored his
personal history and identity.
"Most of my life I've felt like I'm half and half,
culturally," he says.
"I was in my mid-20s when I really learned to integrate my
dual European and New Zealand heritage. Up till then, I felt
like I was Danish but lived in New Zealand. Now, I feel like
a New Zealander who was born in Denmark.
"All the places I have lived still exist in me and contain
the life that I lived there. Frequently in dreams I will find
myself in buildings that seamlessly contain rooms from my
childhood home in Denmark and in my current flat in Dunedin."
He uses familiar colonial touchstones to reach into the past;
reassuring and seemingly innocuous motifs of people, dogs,
birds and tendrilled flowers.
But there is a darkness there: an evil doppelganger resentful
of another's success.
In one image is a sun-drenched streetscape. But its mirrored
image speaks of malevolence and failure. Artwork from the
wrong side of the tracks.
His mezzotints and aquatints are burnished with tradition and
yet glow with a contemporary fire.
The effect is an otherworldly essence of old European and new
New Zealand.
Nielsen's works are also unusual in that they are sought by
artist peers and collectors alike.
"I'm well-stoked if other artists like them. That's a big
compliment as far as I'm concerned," he says.
Nielsen is a three-time Mainland Art Awards winner and was
recently named in Australian lifestyle magazine
Mindfood as "an artist to look out for in 2009 and
beyond".
He also collaborated on an illustrated poetry book, 12
Poems by Hone Tuwhare, interpreted by 7 Dunedin
printmakers, at a University of Otago Library Special
Collections printmaker's residency in 2007, with Marilynn
Webb, Mary McFarlane, Simon Kaan, Inge Doesburg, Kathryn
Madill and Jenna Packer.
Nielsen produced a print of a tent in response to Tuwhare's
poem Rain.
"The tent in the image is the place where I first read the
poem. At Christmas 2006, my partner gave me a journal in
which she had written the poem Rain on the first
page," he recalls.
"The tent in the image is the place where I first read the
poem. The rhythmic sound and feeling of the droplets on the
skin of the tent makes for a light, hypnotic sleep with a
deep sense of sensual comfort."
And dreams, he might have added.
See it
"Familiars" is on at the Artist's Room until December 5.
