MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Art. BFA Faculty of Art, Design & Music, Kingston University London. In her artistic practice Nanna Lysholt Hansen is investigating relationships between the body, language, voice, gender and technology. By using her own personal experiences of the female body, sexuality, pregnancy, birth and motherhood she draws attention to the body as a technological and biological intergenerational mediator of knowledge, voice and memory.
My work is engaged in discourses around feminism, labor and technological change. Embedded in the works are confluences of technique and meaning, craft and digital media, and everyday materials with fine art forms. The work is situated at the nexus of life and art, and walks a boundary between work and love. Labor and love act broadly as dual domains which sustain my interest in the ways a subject acts and is acted upon by intersecting social, economic, intimate, emotional and political forces. While some works describe the ways in which labor and love converge in personal and economic experience, others begin to search for meanings of love that may deviate from material, economic conditions to transform the terms of our intimate and collective relationships.
My current work and research is focused on the possibility of what a feminist form may consist of beyond current feminist content, imagery, and histories. Through sculpture, performance, video, and sound, I perform a visibility that, in normative patriarchal society, is preferred to remain invisible. The question of feminist form transcends the product and is inclusive of my practice and methodology. In doing this, a slippage occurs where the separation of studio activity and domestic responsibility is blurred.
In the performance In Balance With, my six-year-old daughter, Chloe, and I sit at opposite ends of an empty sixteen-foot seesaw. During the thirty-minute performance, I add items that represent our lives such as toys, her books and sketchbook, my research books, food, laundry, tools, and pots and pans to her side of the seesaw. Constantly checking in with her well being, I continue until both sides have reached equilibrium. While hovering in a balanced state, I am continually counteracting her every move. Here we remain until she is ready to come down. In communication the entire time, the words we share are available to the audience but are not for the audience.
This piece is the confluence of many of my ideas. It relays and relies upon the non-privileged, unspoken language of the maternal, the process as opposed to the product, and the repositioned domestic dialog. When the performance ends, what remains is a laden seesaw complete with identifiable objects representing one’s life: a sculpture that tells a tale.
The non-hierarchical triad of feminism, language, and maternity forms the unique basis for my work. The French feminist Luce Irigaray describes woman “as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) ‘subject’ to reflect himself, to copy himself”1. I use language as a medium in my work to represent the gap in both “meaning” and “intention,” as well as the notion of “excess” as Irigaray connotes. How does the methodology I will use be sympathetic to feminist form? How will my decisions be based on this? Feminist form is non-hierarchical. It has options and choices; it is excess and multiplicitous, not singular. It will not be categorized, but create it’s own category. It is a process that is not based on product. It accumulates and is messy, but is not interested in making messes. It is an invitation, not a statement.