TEXTURES

2012-Ongoing // Wherever I am

We come into contact with our environments every day, though we often shield ourselves from it, with clothes, shoes, gloves, and lately masks. I’ve always been extremely sensitive to the textures around me, later I have learned that this was likely an early sign of my autism that I didn’t understand, sensitive to how clothing felt or tags or what sitting on a bench felt like, or laying in the grass, walking barefoot. And without it being obvious to me at the time, this was what let me, in 2012, to take a small Moleskine notebook to the wall of my then live/work studio in Copenhagen and rub the paper with a wide carbon pencil, to copy, to see, to understand the texture of the wall around me. I labeled the backside of the paper: WALL / MY ROOM / AMAGER STRANDVEJ 122 / PEELING PLASTER.

This would be the first of endless textures that I have since rubbed in all of the distinct places and spaces I have found myself, from important architectural spaces, such as Luis Barragán’s studio wall, to the mundane, a Dokin’ Donuts tray in Berlin, to the personal, a family chair armrest. Continuously collecting the memory of touch, of the spaces I move through. 

The collection is currently as of May 2022, working on book 38. Books 5 & 7 have gone missing, and rather than replacing them, I like to think of them as having a life on their own. I remember that book 7 only had about 4 textures when it disappeared in a fog of moppet smoke in the Copenhagen NorthWest. And Book 17, I have gifted and don’t know what has happened to it since then.