Raven Kiss

Intimate Immensity

Textiles lie at the border between the self and the world. They present the malleable boundary that lies between my inner dream world and the external surrounding. They are the surface of contact. The clothes we wear, the sheets we sleep in, or the semi-transparent curtains hanging in front of our windows. On one side met by the owner, and on the other side by a glance of a stranger, the touch of a friend, the wooden chair or a rather cold wall. Beneath this phenomena lies the tension between opposites. The desire to withdraw or to be alone and the need to engage with one’s surrounding. ‘Space is nothing but a horrible inside outside’, says Gaston Bachelard. It is a continuous play of sides, with sporadic alternation between the two, withdrawing from and engaging with the surrounding.

Through daily encounters with myself and the people around me, I am constantly made aware of the ‘edges’ of intimate spaces. My fascination with the subject started while exploring the surface of my own body, my skin. Through skin we touch but simultaneously experience being touched. It fascinates me how the skin performs this duality, and becomes a meeting place of the inner and outer world. My interests has since shifted towards how we act and use public and private spaces. Borders of the internal and external worlds start to blur, shift, shrink and expand. Rather than static entities, borders have become spaces of meeting and mingling to me. In my work I speculate on this depending relation between inner and outer worlds and how the body and space influences this relation.