Hard Earned Innocence
“Let everything that's been planned come true.
Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions.
Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy,
but just the friction between their souls and the outside world.
And most important, let them believe in themselves.
Let them be helpless like children,
because weakness is a great thing,
and strength is nothing.
When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible.
When he dies, he is hard and insensitive.
When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant.
But when it's dry and hard, it dies.
Hardness and strength are death's companions.
Pliancy and weakness
are expressions of the freshness of being.
Because what has hardened will never win.”
– Andrei Tarkovsky (The Stalker)
The exhibition consists of eight paper-works that have an apparent fragility but at the same time a very tangible presence. They are delicate, textured pieces made from prepared paper, laid in color baths, rinsed off, and painted again. The contrast between the fragile nature of the works and their raw, almost brutal energy creates a mesmerizing tension. The pieces are process-based, made in an interaction between the intuitive and rigorous methods. There is a fixed and set-up color pallete from the outset. So, M.B. only works partially instinctively; the beginning of her process is wordless and unconscious, but the conscious formal considerations come into the process, and eventually, language enters. The artist insists on materiality - the tactile is the most important. The works for the exhibition Hard Earned Innocence have been created in a chemical reaction over time, and the paint's pigment settles as dust on top of the prepared paper and retains them in the present. They are suspended in time so that the materials can be allowed to maintain their rawness their life. The works are as much about the materials as they are the inevitable, indirect artist self-portrait.
https://www.idoart.dk/kalender/marie-irmgard-birkedal-hard-earned-innocense