Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Phaeton exhibition, The Antique Museum, Aarhus, Denmark

Invitation for private view and performance

Please come along if you are in the area.
Exhibition period: 13.11. - 13.12.2015

Phaeton

PHAETON

Influenced by Metamorphoses, a myth told by the Roman poet Ovid, the series of work explores Phaethon, who descends into heaven on the search for his father Phoebus, God of the sun. Having induced his father to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun across the heavens for one day, the horses, feeling a weaker hand, run wildly out of their course and towards the earth, threatening to burn it. Seeing this danger, Zeus intervenes and destroys Phaethon with a bolt of lightning and he falls from the sky, landing in the legendary river Eridanus where he was found by the river nymphs who mourn and bury him – their tears turning into amber.

The story will be portrayed through an array of medias: moving image, sculpture, print and performance.

Title: Son of the Sun
Year: 2015
Category: moving image
Duration: 7:20 min
Location: Helgenæs, Denmark
Materials: Montage of 3D image.
Dimensions: ( Variable monitor/screen)
Exhibited: 2015 PHAETON The Antique Museum, Aarhus Denmark
Animation and editing: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard
Music: Andreas Tegnander
Photo: Alida Sayer & the artist

Title: A Dancing Star
Year: 2015
Category: moving image
Duration: 6:15 min
Location: various locations, Denmark
Materials: Montage of 3D image.
Dimensions: ( Variable monitor/screen)
Exhibited: 2015 PHAETON The Antique Museum, Aarhus Denmark
Animation and editing: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard
Photo: Alida Sayer & Nanna Bjerregaard

Title: Feeling the weaker hand, runs wildly (star map)
Year: 2015
Category: wall hanging
Materials: Direct print on animal hide
Dimensions: 170 x 100 cm
Exhibited: 2015 PHAETON The Antique Museum, Aarhus Denmark

Title: And their tears turned into amber (the fall of Phaeton)
Year: 2015
Category: performance
Duration: 20 min
Location: The Antique Museum, Aarhus Denmark
Materials: Clay
Dimensions: 3 x 2 m
Exhibited: 2015 PHAETON The Antique Museum, Aarhus Denmark

Making of the video work 'Son of the Sun'

Here are some documentation photos from the process of making the moving image work 'Son of the Sun' (Original title: Solens Søn). The imagery of the film is produced by Alida Sayer and so are the photos below.

We went to a cabin in the woods, the three of us, Alida, myself and most importantly the muse, whom I need to tell you a lot more about.

Evening

Morning

Passage and Departure

Charlottenborg Kunsthal

Spring exhibition

See my work at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark at the Spring Exhibition taking place 22nd of Jan to 1st of March 2015. Private view 22nd of Jan. from 19.00 to 22.00.

More info: Link

I will be showing these little babies from the series 'The winner takes it all' I made in Scotland last year.

Phaeton

Star map

Sketches for Phaeton:

Phaetons route across the sky, where the reins slips out of his hands and the horses runs wild.

The morning when Phaeton sat out for his ride.

You know my name (Pythia)

Step 1. The Journey

The starting point for the work is how our identity deals with the co-existence, of both a primitive ancient part of our brain and on top of that, a further developed civilized part in the front. To categorises it in the term of the old Greeks, the co-existence of the Apollonian reasonable and logical thinking and its’ contrast, the Dionysian chaos and appealing to the emotions and instincts and how all great tragedies, is based on the tension between these two. Seeking inspiration in previous eras, the ritual in this film has a myth.

Title: You know my name (Pythia)
Year: 2014
Category: Web visualisation based on the performance 'Pythia' (and extract from moving image)
Duration: Variable
Materials: 3D image, trophy objects, mask and performance.

Location: Hampstead, London
Photo: Jim Woodall

Animation: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

20.03.2014, 43 Marefield Garden, London

Step 2. Preparation

The photos has a relationship to quite a disparate combination of image-based activities, from formal statue to Vogue to some kind of feminist liberation imagery from the 60s. The way it speaks about time as a series of atomised embalmed moments, the way it quivers on the edge of vibrating movement and complete stillness.

Title: 'Pythia'
Year: 2014
Category: Web visualisation based on the performance 'Pythia' (and extract from moving image)
Duration: Variable
Materials: 3D image, trophy objects, mask and performance.

Location: Hampstead, London
Photo: Jim Woodall

Animation: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Trophies

Step 3. The question

You put your question, receive your answer and depart.

This myth being interpreted here is Pythia, the name of the priestess’ of the oracle at Delphi. The film is as a journey to Delphi, the construction of the narration is driven by the lack of distinction between being the one asking questions and giving answers. The act of submission passing into the role of the oracle and a re-enacting the plea to gain insight into the forthcoming course of life becomes the same motion.

The film might rather be a non-film, than a film. A montage, not only as moments in time, but as points in space so saturated that, they become living moments with the essence and aura of celluloid film but travelling and reverberating in many more directions than simply back and forward, transcending time and place.

Location: Hampstead, London
Photo: Jim Woodall

Animation: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Home

Step 4. The exit

Oracles was meant to give advice to shape future actions

You know my name

Location: Hampstead, London
Photo: Jim Woodall

Animation: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

The winner takes it all

Residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshop, 2014.

Installation view

Title: The winner takes it all (trophy I)
Year: 2014
Category: Sculpture, object to use in performance 'Pythia'
Materials: Veg tan leather
Dimensions: 60 x 30 x 8 cm

Exhibited: 2015 Spring Exhibition, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. 2014. 'Sunday Salon', Slate Projects, London, UK.
Photo credits: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Title: The loser standing small (trophy II)

Year: 2014
Category: Sculpture, object to use in performance 'Pythia'
Materials: Veg tan leather
Dimensions: 70 x 40 x 12 cm

Exhibited: 2015 Spring Exhibition, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. 2014. 'Sunday Salon', Slate Projects, London, UK.

Photo credits: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Title: It simple and is plain (medal box I)

Year: 2014
Category: Sculpture
Materials: Cloth
Dimensions: 60 x 40 x 20 cm

Photo credits: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Title: Why should I complain (trophy III)

Year: 2014
Category: Sculpture, object to use in performance 'Pythia'
Materials: Veg tan leather
Dimensions: 100 x 30 x 7 cm

Exhibited: 2015 Spring Exhibition, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. 2014. 'Sunday Salon', Slate Projects, London, UK.

Photo credits: Helle Kingbird Bjerregaard

Raw meat/Long after the days

Long after the days and the seasons

As a part of the piece 'Let me sleep! Let me boil, On the altars of Solomon; Let me soak the rusty soil' London, 2013, duration: 12 days. I re-enacted Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Barbaric.

I chose this poem, because (as I find in many of Rimbaud’s poems), the words does not only change into images in my head, but into acts/actions I know how to perform on and with the clay. The whole composition of the poem is shaped as choreography of movement and motion of material, not only as a gesture, but driven by spirit.

When I study the words: - being beyond mere language, they have that rare quality of carrying saturated materiality. Not only is the poem loaded with materiel, it furthermore achieves to describe materiality in lyrics. In words depicting the actuality of the world - both as incomprehensible phenomenon and as the heavy solid soil - within manageable images we can bring with us.

-- Oh! the banner of raw meat against the silk of seas and arctic flowers;

(they do not exist).-- Bliss! Live embers raining in gusts of frost.--

Bliss!-- fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds

flung out by the earth's heart eternally carbonized for us.

-- O world! (Far from the old retreats and the old flames, still heard, still felt.)

Fire and foam. Magic, veering of chasms and clash of icicles against the stars.

O bliss, O world, O music! And forms, sweat, eyes

and long hair floating there.

And white tears boiling,--

Photos by: Kirsten Abildgaard & Alida Sayer

Kingbird: Rivers

"The River", Butlers Wharf Pier, London, 2013. Duration: 3 days, photos by Alida Sayer, poem: 'Blackcurrant River', A. Rimbaud.

Everything flows with [the] horrible mysteries of ancient

landscapes

It is along these banks that you can hear

the dead passions of errant knights:

but how the wind is wholesome.

Let the traveller look through these clerestories:

he will journey on more bravely.

As I descended into impassable rivers

I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen

Blackcurrant river rolls unknown in strange valleys, blackcurrant river rolled unknown into strange valleys:

- when several winds swept down.

Kingbird: Let me sleep, let me boil...

Here are some of the images from the piece 'Let me sleep! Let me boil, On the altars of Solomon; Let me soak the rusty soil' London, 2013, duration: 12 days.

I have previously posted the intentions I had with the piece. (Which you can read here). Since the actual construction of the piece was taking place during the show, I didn't have any images of it until after the show. Looking at and organising these images is always an interesting process, where new aspects of the piece are coming alive, well, in a way, it is point where I actually realises what I have made.

I am going to show you images from the performance chosen and arranged in relation to the different topics and poems, of which, they were inspired and conceived. It will be an on-going process and things might change a bit from time to time.

The chapters or topics are: