Artist statement
As a child I grew up between packages and price tags due to the fact my parents own their own toy store. Ever since I was little I have always been attracted by the colors and the designs of the products and how they can hypnotise you to need that specific item. As I got older I started noticing this attraction in other stores too but mainly in supermarkets. In recent years I have developed a great interest in psychology, sociology and philosophy about consumerism, but also interests in gastronomy, nutrition and food psychology.
Via the paintings that I make I would like to engage in a conversation about individuality and identity through consumerism, but also would like to give the possibility to look at consumerism from a different angle. With the work I would like to discuss the role of consumerism in our daily lives and how quickly we can feel the impact of international events in our shopping carts. How does social media influence our food culture with rapid changing food trends and how does this impact our demand for new innovative products. What does this innovation mean to the design of these products and is it possible that we can use this to point out and document a specific era in time.
Within the products that we purchase we can tell more about the individual buying these items than what is for dinner that night. Products can tell us very personal things about the consumer, what is their background, financial status, diet, how sustainable the consumer is and even how many people the household consists of. In this way, we can look at products like a kind of personality traits that eventually will form portraits of the consumer.
Apart from this I would like to explore topics such as awareness of nutrition, psychology and sustainability. I would like to invest in new ways to transform the necessity of grocery shopping to an experience of a simulation. I am working on the largest possible collection of international, special, limited edition packages and will use these to design unreal, exclusive, high-end shopping bags. With this I am building an international archive of supermarket products that show a glimpse of what future supermarkets possibly can offer. Besides using these products to compose paintings, I will use the psychical collected products to design store shelves that will function as the foundation of the fictional supermarket I am developing. The paintings and the installations will be presented together during future exhibitions.
