Grete Dalum

‘Until it burst the Hearts’
Emily Dickinson poem no. 567

My artistic project seeks to create a visual poetics with roots in equal parts language and images. The text creates images (collages) and the images create text (systems, references, repetitions). In a study of how we store and structure knowledge and emotions, I have visited beekeepers and listened to their insights into the bees' systems and structures.

I would try to create a perfect Buckminster Fuller pavilion of images and thoughts from the archive of emotions, in the spirit of the bees, but with mathematical precision. But systems are collapsing. The beauty of bee architecture is that they adapt and transform their storage systems as soon as they come outside the hive.

When the queen dies, the systems collapse, but the bees build a new queen and the systems regenerate. Human systems are collapsing, emotionally, knowledge is collapsing and our basic understanding of what is going on around us and in us is collapsing. We regenerate and build new systems. They are similar to the old ones, but they are built on a new foundation.

Hearts burst, the sublime, the catastrophic, small things, a name, a step, a leaf, a branch, a wave washing over a rock. Knowledge is fleeting. Being is fleeting. The cyanotypes are a point, a document of the ephemeral. Extended (slightly). I have an archive of moments. Some of them I have used to create the cyanotypes. By taking the photograph back to a trace of an emotion, a trace of a being, I hope to take it away from the data point, from the industrial and back to the temporary, to the longing, after presence.

The cyanotypes are a direct imprint of the sun, of the attention, what the sun shines on, what we look at, what we focus is burnt onto the retina and creates images, structures, poetics, they are there, the systems, the images; here they are.