Residence

Seattle, Wa, USA

Place of Birth

Austin, Mn, USA

Biography

My most recent work is a series of semi-abstract landscapes influenced by a Danish family’s photograph album which documents time spent at their cabin on Stormosen, south of Copenhagen, in 1941-42.  At that time, Copenhagen was under Nazi occupation and Stormosen served as their retreat from the realities of the period.  I am drawn to this album because I see in the photos the relationships among family, landscape, safety, and decay, ideas/subjects that are a recurring theme in my life and work.

We all have a landscape inside of us that is familiar, that gives us a sense of well-being. It may be tied up with family memories, or refuge from something dangerous, or carefree interaction with the natural world.  Like the worn paint on an old car, old window glass, or mason jars that won’t come clean from water’s lime calcification, I am in love with the richness of surface from wear and decay.  Exploring these things in a visual space between dream and reality, my recent work is less focused on detail and more on surface and tonal changes, further echoed by my ever-changing relationship with the materials: pigments, wood, and wax.

The connection between the organic natures that beeswax and pigments offer, and the ideas within my art stem from my own upbringing.  My refuge from turmoil as a child was my grandmother’s primitive farm in south central Minnesota. A keen observer of nature, my grandmother was my pied piper. We walked areas of the farm before dark with switch in hand, chasing the biting deer flies away as we observed together what birds were roosting in the chokecherry trees and following where deer tracks led to the creek. We tried to determine what animal the bones we found had originally belonged to. By day we cut weeds, dragged branches and limbs into the woods surrounding the house, and set pails of water in the sun to later wash our faces and bathe our feet in. Her collections were fallen nests, eggs and eggshells, prehistoric Native American stone implements and cowbells.  These early encounters with my grandmother and her sensibilities, combined with the refuge the farm provided, deeply influence the work I make today.

 

Contact Information

e_borgesen@hotmail.com

Representation

SAM Gallery

Artist's Website

Borgesen.com