STATEMENT OF MY WORK
Already as a child I dreamed about making sculptures in stone. At the age of five I knew the feeling that there were lines and forms that belonged to me and could express me in the world. When asked by adults what I wanted to become when I grew up, I replied: "I already am a sculptor, I have only not started sculpting yet!"
At the age of eighteen, when I decided to go to Italy to learn how to carve marble, I knew I had to find my own forms.
So I spent two years searching for my own lines. These two years I did not touch a stone, I only drew my lines with black pen on white paper. I let go of all ideas about how the result had to be, I only focused on making one perfect line, one perfect form.
I believed that if every line and every form was perfect, the final result would be perfect as well. The word “perfect” in this context meaning completely mine.
I discovered early that all my drawings in one way or the other contained human forms. “So”, I thought, “Perfection to me lays somewhere in the meeting between humanity and hard material truth”.
My works in stone have only made this feeling stronger. I prefer hard stones, and I make, both in glass and in stone, only unique pieces. In stone I execute all the sculpting myself. The work in glass I do in cooperation with my partner, dutch glass artist Reina Oversteegen.
I think the best way to line out the statement in my art is to quote the Danish gallery owner and art collector Johnny Emil Larsen who once said:
“what connects his work, in all its diversity, is that when one looks at the sculptures, one gets the feeling that Fredrik has carved the granite with his own fingernails”.