Artist Statement, 2024
Mette Winckelmann

Geometry is a principle of understanding the world, and as such a structure that is also embedded in the human body. Symmetry, measurement, balance, size, scale are geometric and mathematical tools used to map, define, and understand the individual vis-à-vis the collective, and the distances between them. Thereby, geometry can be a way to define society, and a category for understanding that which lies both within and outside the body.
Knowing the overall circumference of a given area and its related boundaries are important coordinates for my research process and method. I start by establishing an understanding of the overall surface, material, or area of the piece, and formulate ways of dividing that ground which follows mathematical systems. These are self-formulated rules because for me systems are about belonging; the longing to fit in, to feel safe, to be accepted within a given structure, and to find your place in the overall onto-epistemology of things. At the same time, I also acknowledge that any given rules, structures, and norms imply exclusion and discourage deviation.
The grid is often seen as a metaphor for society’s structure and rules and can be utilized as a system of organizing things, people, systems, and perhaps the world itself. This is why it’s important for me to deploy the grid and to push against its organizing agenda, as a way of triggering a transformation. I aim to stretch formats and categories by diving into the specificities of a given material and/or medium, probing its properties and exploring its possibilities. I want to push beyond the expectations and limitations that are associated with a specific material and its conventional usage in order to find new ways in which it can perform and establish meaning that can somehow also contain doubt, questioning, and its own unmaking.
I am aware that working with color is working with references, associations, feelings, and senses. Unlike specific primary colors that are often assertive and declarative, in-between colors can hold room for negotiation where meaning can be less identifiable and can therefore activate our senses in new and unexpected ways. The frontal aspects of my work are enmeshed layers of grids, systems, colors, material, and textures that are enmeshed in a visual syntax where the aesthetic choices are to perform a visual activism, where I want to raise issues of economy, class, gender, and politics of the individual and collective body.