In 2003, Christine Aerfeldt’s work was recently acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. In the same year she won a Project Assistance Grant from Arts SA. This follows on from being joint winner in 2001 category ‘Rising Stars’ , The Advertiser Oscarts, as well as joint winner of Best New Talents and in 2000 had won a scholarship to study at Adelaide central School of Art.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1
People often assume that I like dolls – a typically girlie sort of thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I was aged four, I savagely cut the hair off one of my dolls in an act of both boredom and defiance. Most of the dolls and figurines in my artworks normally live in my mother or grandmother’s house – either standing on the mantelpiece, or tucked amongst other precious things in a carved wood and glass cabinet. They have always been a part of my life.
In ‘Heaven & Hell’ I produce paintings and digital images of dolls wearing stereotypical quasi-Estonian/German national costumes, in slightly surreal and out of context settings. Friedrich and Liesl, Erika and Rolf, Gretl and Kurt, Wilhelm and Wanda – there’s a boy-girl thing going on here. A northern European sensibility permeates my work. Things are best in pairs, or matching sets.
However this is largely a pretext for exploring the subconscious and my inner life. I am interested in the thoughts contained in the
'suppressed' subconscious mind, and the way in which they somehow seem to slip through the cracks to reveal themselves despite our best efforts. I deliberately let the subconscious unfold when constructing my imagery. Niceness meets Nasty; Pretty meets Mean; The Sound of Music meets the Grimm-est of Fairy tales, meets ‘The Truman Show’. All with a sugar coating, of course, presented in the nicest possible way.
I have been exploring Jung, dreams and folk traditions, as well as the nature of reality, memory and our own personal consciousness.
In ‘Heaven & Hell’ I use and manipulate some of the images of paintings from the Prado Museum, which now appear as backdrops and settings for my subtle ‘psycho-dramas. Time is blurry and flexible. The past and present merge and collide, as consciousness and memory engage in a dizzy slippery slide. Nothing is quite certain or real. Or subtle for that matter… As in the most vivid dream, details are stacked on top of more details; there is an excess and overload of colour and information.
Maximalism’, as opposed to minimalism, is the aim.
So it is in this way that my characters have been born. They each develop a life of their own. Wunderkind Wanda imagines herself to be large, powerful and terrifying – a Wagnerian Brunhilde – who marches across the romantic landscapes of Europe seeking adventure. Her brother, Wunderkind Wilhelm is a slightly more timid character and needs to prove himself. Little Erika hears voices and strange whisperings, but pretends not to. Her brother Rolf is a true martyr – always doing good for others.
Sometimes my characters loom terrifyingly large, other times they are tiny – undergoing Alice In Wonderland-like transformations. Nothing is quite right in this world, although it may initially seem that way. My ‘dolls’ invent and play out stories, sometimes from boredom, and sometimes for other reasons. |
