Wudubinde
Mette Rasmussen
January 20 - February 2, 2020
@
Jennifer Artspace
Kvibergs Kaserner, Gothenburg
Ivy grows everywhere in my garden. I feel like dressing it embracingly in the same manner as it embraces my stone fence. The stones lie like flakes upon each other. There are big bushes and trees in my garden, I play that the garden is a forest, mine only. Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown. Wudubinde means ivy in Old English. I can hear winter-like tones coming from afar, white and dry, but soft like rabbits. It must come from the market. I recall the smell of skins and fried pig, but I do not go to the market anymore. Today I am fetching “The Under-Earthlings” by Bernhard Severin Ingemann at the library in Nexø. I do not know much about fairytales, they never really caught my interest. I am thinking of a drawing by Johan Thomas Lundbye. “He likes to listen to stories” it says, written in cursive over the motif depicting Sindre, Lundbye’s gnome-like alter ego, with the narrating elf king, portrayed with a thyrsus and a felid, whose paw he is holding. Ornamentation drawn with pen on thin volatile paper. I knock the soil off of my clogs and put on my reed shoes. Now I am home. It is warm and comfortable here. Noises are coming from the fireplace, maybe there is a gnome living in there. I have a tub in my basement made out of rose wood where I can bathe. I have lavender oil, but the white goods and the cold and dirty concrete floor is deterring me from dipping my body into the warm water. Mother, mother, make my bed! It was night time and it seemed as if the Room transformed into an ultramarine ocean filled with small lightships. I hope there is a tanker in the darkness of The Baltic Sea filled with light and a happy crew. The face glows when the heart is happy. M y house becomes different in the winter storm, but I am not afraid. Brown itching legends creep under the skin on my arms, was that a whisper? I could sleep / I could sleee-eeep / I could sleep / I could sleee-eeep / When I lived alone / Is there a ghost in my house? W here do I find the forest here? The forest fills the entire island. Death wonders around like a young companion with golden hair in Váchal’s forest, and the eyes of Nøkken shines and stares in Panuška’s sucking green bog. Who hides in the cliffs? One breaks the skull with one slip on the greasy moss. People from here and there correspond with each other about supernatural forces, I don’t know what huldras talk about. The Fynshoved Man rolls over the frostbeaten fields at winter solstice. Once I sought for shelter from the storm in a passage grave at Hindsholm. Somebody had sacrificed there. The lightning hit me, it hit me deeply. Do I miss Funen? Things are very different here. I miss Leonora Christina Ulfeldt in a thousand pigment-heavy colors, I most often miss people that have been dead in more than a hundred years. Ruins bring me together with her on this island. The mice ate her tallow candles while she was imprisoned, but she lived and loved despite it.
