mendel hardeman > artist statement

About my work

How it happens

My work consists of moving a spoon around in a huge pot. Stir, have a look, reflect, continue stirring. A pot full of all things that had the urge to drop into it, and then felt at home and decided to stay. A gluey soup of archetypes, metaphors, and symbols. It's not really me who chooses them - they seem to choose me. And as I am busy with them, trying to shape them so they can be used in a work of art, they suddenly come to life, turn around, and use me instead. And what I discover in the end is, that they did a much better job in expressing what I even didn't know I was trying to say, than I could ever have dreamt of doing on my own.
I think that's why in my work symbolism is never abstract or instrumental. It is always very much crawling over the surface. The metaphors and symbols live. They breathe, they laugh, they bleed, they stink, they bite your nails, they have a hammer to hit you and a feather to tickle you, they try to take you by the throat and kidnap you into their world. And they convey what only they can convey.

My role in the process could be described as: sitting and waiting next to the big and fathomless hole, lurking very patiently, until some creature (idea, metaphor, symbol, archetype, whatever) does Peekaboo! I quickly grab its nose, pull it out, and throw it into the henhouse I use as storage room, where it is immediately and clamorously welcomed by my previous catches. And all I do is watch. There the stories happen. They sniff at each other, they scream, they jump, they sweat out of every single armpit, they make love, they fight, they use their hammers and feathers, they procreate, and out come more and even stranger creatures. And all I do is watch.

Thematic

What interests me most is the field of tension between us people (twenty-first century beings with the lives we live), this planet and universe that have an unimaginably longer history than we do, and the images of eternity and transcendence we have carried inside of us for so many generations. Religion, and the meanings old religious stories and objects still have in our seemingly secular and uprooted daily life, are my main inspiration, and also my main obsession.
And of course there are love and death - the universal sources of inner conflict, that get mixed up in everything we try to do. I can't escape them.

Why

Production is conscious and planned; creation is given in silence, and to empty hands. And here lies one of the main conflicts I face again and again. It's so easy to run into "production mode" and lose touch with the creating force that pulled you into it. And it takes hard measures to free yourself again.
When I look at the work I have done so far it is easy to point out which works were born out of financial need, "smart career moves", all kinds of commissions, etc, and which ones erupted from the boiling and steaming and shivering ground - those are the ones that, had I not crystalized and pacified them, would have poisoned me from the inside and from the outside, and made any form of life completely unbearable.

Mendel Hardeman, 2006

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