SOMMERREJSEN TILBAGE (THE SUMMER JOURNEY HOME)
Once, the distance from Copenhagen to Vejby in North Zealand in Denmark was longer than today. Mileage wise there is obviously no difference, but mentally speaking it was quite different.
In late May 1843 painter collegues and friends J. Th. Lundbye and P.C. Skovgaard went off to Vejby and stayed there all summer. The trip resulted in numerous drawings and oil studies, which the National Danish Gallery got together in 1989 at the exhibition “Summer Travel to Vejby 1843″. The title refers both to the return to a place and for looking backwards in time – in all imaginable ways.
Participants in the exhibition Summer Journey Home in 2010, are 5 female artists Carina Zunino, Malene Hartmann, Marika Seidler, Cecilia Westerberg, Vibe Bredahl and author Gitte Broeng.
Cecilia Westerberg’s project on Johan Thomas Lundbye has in many ways a delicate transparency. Amongst other works she has created a double drawing on tracing paper using Lundbye’s sketchbook drawings as starting points.
“I mirror myself in my great grandfathers’ uncle, his melancholy, doubt and romantic longings. Here, J.T.L looks at himself in the mirror in 1841, 23 years old: seven years later, in 1848, the year of his death, he is portrayed by a friend. The first, a self-portrait – the other, a colleagues’ portrayal- is it the same man? ‘My grandfather shot himself. For both men, life got in the way” writes Westerberg in meticulous penmanship across the bottom of the drawing. She exposes her personal examinations of the situation and of the work itself. Through the concrete process of tracing these drawings, she attempts to get a closer perspective on her distant relative. The act of drawing him creates an opening to him and at the same opens a space of uncertainty and mystery that then surrounds him again. Her personal knowledge of his fate asserts itself onto the act of seeing this portrait. An inner and outer gaze, so to speak.
This double drawing is mounted in a box with other drawings and diverse objects from her grandmothers’ closet – which includes books, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera relating to Lundbye. With the help of these objects and the carefully drawn, sensitive tracing of her relatives’ lines, Westerberg creates a story both concrete and poetic.
The video projection, Porten is inspired by Lundbye’s drawing of the drawbridge at the entrance to Asserbo Plantage dated July 13, 1843. The video is shot at the same location and then transformed to computer line art -a type of animation made from contour drawings.
A woman is seen walking on a path through the trees towards the entrance, she looks back at someone. At the gate she turns around and goes back in the same direction disappearing – or dissolving -into the trees. This ghostly disappearing number repeats itself in a loop and the women’s repeated traverse never breaks through to the foreground. In this way, Westerberg once again adds a layer of reflection to the projects’ general theme of reaching out to a person that is gone and to mirror oneself in them or in an earlier self and to the difficulty of constancy in this life.
Perhaps this gentle approach is a respectful entryway to things that were.
