Cathrine Raben Davidsen
The Lesser Stone
With THE LESSER STONE, the visual artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen invites the public into a sensory installation that explores relations among alchemy, contrasting pairs and new ways of looking at the world.
A four-metre long collage unfolds a ‘mind map’ of the artist’s sources of inspiration on the surface of a meeting-table. There are various writings, natural phenomena and symbols from the world of alchemy. The symbols recur on the walls and bear witness to the artist’s interest in alchemy and its doctrines.
Today alchemy is understood as a chemical science that operates in an area spanning physics, philosophy and mysticism. Ceramic vessels that imitate laboratory flasks are placed at various levels in the space and refer to the alchemists’ experiments with mixing different elements in the hope of creating gold – which is why they were often seen as magicians. The meeting-room by no means consists of gold, but of an installation, which, like the alchemists, works with the mixing of contrasts, where science and magic are allowed to co-exist. With its bright colours and ingenious mysticism, Cathrine Raben Davidsen’s installation thus invites reflection over new ways of viewing the world and its multiple possible mixtures.
Montanasalen is a special conceptual space at GL STRAND where successive artists are invited to relate to the framework of the meeting-room by installing of an artistic decoration.
Cathrine Raben Davidsen trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and academies of art in Italy and The Netherlands. Her works are rooted in our own time while at the same time they reach both forward and back in time and create connections between personal, historical and universal systems. Rather than taking an interest in traditional hierarchies in art, crafts and design, she is preoccupied with diversity and transformations, on the basis of which she explores what it means to be human – and how the definition of being human is in constant flux.
