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TALENTS: Amalie Vestergaard Olsen – Danish Visual Artist
Amalie Vestergaard Olsen
Visual Artist
What inspires you?
There are many things that inspire me! It is very timed by seasons, moods and affected by whatever is going on in my life. Since it’s fall, it’s getting darker and everything changes really fast, I am getting into a gloomy mood, where I only listen to Post Punk and watch ‘The Craft’ on repeat. It inspires me to embrace the season and enjoy that I can stay inside, read books, cook food and watch old movies.
What does your work mean to you?
It means that I get to create spaces to speak about things that matter to me and that I get to interpret historical material in combination with personal stories. I can use history to understand the present through my artwork.
The artwork I create are constructions, and like everything else, they reflect subjective narratives and in that way my work reminds me that art is not necessarily separated from the rest of life. That also means that I have a responsibility to think about what art can be, who it is created for and where it is shown. It means that I have to be alert and critical.
“In other words, I have the opportunity to speak about the pain of others in connection to my own experience.”
Photos: Annelen Røe
What do you think when you hear the word ‘isolation’?
I mostly think about an involuntary condition of loneliness. That if a person is isolated from other people and from society, they also lose the possibility to enter different platforms, to speak and to be seen. I guess this question could be related to COVID-19 and the way our lives have changed this past year.
“When I experienced a time of isolation it made me think of the fact that we work so hard to have leisure time. That freedom has no value if it is not weighed against something else, like hard work.”
It seems as if you can’t work, then freedom has no function. I also think of ‘isolation’ as something that is closely connected to different forms of exclusion. In my practice I often work with stories about the repression of females, especially the history of persecutions of witchcraft in late medieval times and its connection to the rise of capitalism, and how this can be linked to a contemporary understanding of women’s working life and health. When I hear the word isolation, I think of the fact that when groups of people in society are isolated and suppressed, it is always on behalf of someone else’s rise.
Photos: Maya Økland
Latest text message you sent?
Probably asking my boyfriend what’s for dinner or if I should buy toilet paper haha.
Last time you laughed?
Hmm, I can’t remember. But I smiled really big and had a mood when someone sent me the video of @420doggface208 skating and listening to ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I see myself working with art, the rest I don’t know. And that’s totally fine!
Photos: Amalie Vestergaard Olsen