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 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.
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