Att mötas i en vitlökspress - en studie om korpus
My field is Korpus and in this project I am investigating what role that plays for me as an artist connected to craft. To really get close to, and understand Korpus I have deconstructed it to find clues to why the silversmithing field looks like it does and how we got here. I believe Korpus has not yet come out of the closet for what it really can be. That it carries a great heritage of traditions and preconceptions that it would do well to shake off a little bit of. Can Korpus as an art field really survive in Sweden, where the Church has no power and silverware is no longer a need to demonstrate ones economic prosperity at an important dinner party? To help myself get closer to these objects I have given my own definition of Korpus. When doing that I choose to look beyond material, history and form. My main interest is instead the fact that we use these objects in our everyday life, and the way that forms and affects us. A Korpus is an object with a strong connection to the human body and helps us to put other living matter within control in different ways. It has often a function but it is not the function itself that makes the object Korpus. My definition of Korpus applies for use on biological material, and to some extent, dead things that have been alive. To judge if something is Korpus, I look at how people interpret, understand or intentionally use an object on biological material. According to my definition Korpus occur in the moment of use. I state that craft as a field is uniquely connected to the everyday, as it can be both functional objects as well as installations just illuminating that fact. I want to liberate Korpus from its sideboard like jail and let it be what it really is - a tool for communicating with other humans in our daily lives. I am not a silversmith and my work is not material specific ? can I then still connect myself to the craft field and be taken serious? The result of my questions is yes. Korpus belongs to a class (the upper class), it is bound to a material (silver), has a small group of practitioners and few people that even know what it means. But this is only true if I as an artist choose to find myself within these boundaries.