A Violet Cast of a Man Made Hole

As part of an art/archaeological project in Gothenburg, Joel Danielsson made A Violet Cast of a Man Made Hole. It was installed at the Göteborgs Konsthall in 2017 along with work made by other artists who were at the time students of the Akademi Valand at the University of Gothenburg, including Sara Anstis, Behjat Omer Abdulla, Barthélémy Garcia. Work by Sara and Behjat has been featured on www.artarchaeologies.com: Dirt (by Sara Anstis); Unidentified Objects (by Behjat Omer Abdulla)

A Violet Cast is both the act of the digging of the hole (and its rich connections with the primary process of archaeological action – digging and making holes in the ground) and the creation of work that is a hole made manifest (and with it a sophisticated sense of paradox and inverted concepts).

“Joel is a Gothenburg based artist who's work oscillate between the behavioral, environmental and social aspects of the normality of consumerism. 

“His practice is predominantly sculptural and the act of making often becomes an integral part of the work, either as a end to a mean or as a mean in itself. In his work, he is using both industrial and raw materials - from plastic to hand made clay for example, that often involves a slow, tedious or repetitive making process. In the work Easy Made Hard, for instance, he hand smudged a 55 square meter layer of clay onto the gallery floor and left it to crack and dry so that when the visitors were walking on it, a brittle cracky noise and sensation was experienced acoustically as well as physically.

“By opposing and juxtaposing the emotional and the rational, Joel returns to the object as a final destination for dreams and fantasy, where the object becomes both an imaginary scale of success and a symbol of the progression of the self, the desire to continuously become a better version of yourself. Objects and products, thus become ventilators for the externalization of fear, frustration and expectation. 

“Joel often puts the bodily and emotional sensation in the center of his work by reinforcing the interactive and tactical dimension of it. In Plastic Casts of a Cut Down Tree Joel made two identical plastic casts of a tree trunk and installed them as contemplative consumerist objects for the visitors to sit down on in the gallery space. Joel is playing with the dissonance between knowledge and understanding and sees his work as explorations or phrases in an emotional language that enhances the embodied understanding of intellectually intangible questions about the state of our times and the states of our minds. 

[The above text comes from the artist’s webpage: www.joeldanielsson.com/bio]