Carolina Jonsson

The work of Carolina Jonsson often refers to painting and at first glance a video can be perceived as an ever so slightly moving painting. Architect of the Ecolonia archive; which garner materialities, perceptions, and sensations found in everyday life and encountered in nature.

Jonsson has made several commissions for public art, including hospitals and different kinds of accommodations for nursing and residents, commissioned by regions and municipalities in the Nordic countries including Danderyd hospital and Sahlgrenska University hospital.

The video work of Jonsson has been shown in international art exhibitions and filmfestivals such as Image Forum Festival, Impact festival, /sin:/ festival for video art and performance, Los Angeles Centre for Digital Art and Queensland Center for Photography.

Her work is held in the collections of the Public Art Agency Sweden, KORO (Norway), Skövde art museum (Sweden), Region Stockholm (Sweden) among others.

Contact
Carolina Jonsson Studio
info@carolinajonsson.com
+46(0)730505029

Artist Statement

Within this system, the everyday is revalued. New worlds and situations arise that can be both beautiful and daunting, they may contain recognition as well as alienation. The open and ongoing archive Ecolonia also contributes to an exploration of contemporary society’s relationship with nature. It does so by accentuating the aesthetics of experience which might help further a shift in the human conception of an unpredictable nature as an object to be mapped, controlled, and dominated.

Movement is an intrinsic part of how time-images are constructed in my practice. Movement also relates to other aspects of inter-embodied processes. One could imagining an approach to movement as a mode of thinking, as the pacing of an embodied mind. To ‘think’ through the embodied mind would then be a process parallel to conscious thought. This manner of conceiving of an embodied mind as a movement in space, e.g. dance, constitutes new and unexpected expressions of what it implies to be struck by life itself. Much like the treatment of sore bodily trigger points can conjure up new, till now unknown responses in other parts of the body, a walk in nature may evoke unexpected thought processes. The connection between these events remain concealed. It leaves us with a fleeting sense of being whole.

The human body is taught to position itself and react to current ideas and notions of the society it is immersed into. The cultured human body is therefore literally a pattern of habitual repetitions of familiar movements and positions. When the body is introduced as an element in my work it is not so in capacity as an individual subject, but rather as a creature, a parallel existence, a part of nature. While still recognisable as “body”, the human form, momentarily reframed though digital manipulations, is no longer conditioned by its habits but instead expressive of a new difference, an incoherence, a something ‘not yet seen’ or experienced.
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I paint, but in an expanded field, mostly using film and photography. My work often refers to painting and at first glance a video can be perceived as an ever so slightly moving painting. Since 2012, I have been collecting working material in an archive named Ecolonia. The archive contains expressions in film, photography, sculpture, and installation art. I garner materialities, perceptions, and sensations found in everyday life and encountered in nature. The collected body of various phenomena, lived experiences and emotions, is adapted via a set of digital editing techniques imbued with an intuitive rationale. The material undergoes a digitized abstraction development but always with outermost regard for the innate and unique modes of expression of all life.

I am searching for small movements or minor changes that occur within something durable and ongoing, which over time progress in a spiral-like cycle pattern. This implies ongoing time that always returns but in each instance in a slightly altered form. Time thus creates monotone movements that in themselves create a rhythm. A monotonous rhythm indicates the stillness of time. I want to provide circumstances that lends the void a space; a place where the seemingly insignificant resides alongside silence. My work relates to the “in-between” which exists amongst humans, human and nature, between the natural and the man-made. It strives to challenge the boundaries between human, nature, and machine. The void, the gap, the movement-change between still or moving images and between scenes is also of great significance. As an intermediary movement, empty space houses anticipation. The in-betweenness of empty space leaves room for everything and nothing at once. The wait is a precondition for change.

The image archive Ecolonia provides opportunities for innumerable reconfigurations of the materials I collect. Moreover, Ecolonia is my language, my way of describing a reality we co-create with our surroundings. I’m interested in conveying the hidden, that something ‘more’ which resides in nature and goes beyond what meets the eye.