Hanne Grieg Hermansen (1984) has been a member of Tegnerforbundet since 2010. From a distance, her works look like photographs, but if you take a closer look at the works, you suddenly discover both rough and whimsically drawn pencil lines on the image surface. In some of the more recent works, she also uses colored pencil. In a time-consuming process that can span several months or even years, she transfers carefully selected photographs onto paper. The motivation underlying the drawings is the curiosity to investigate photography as a medium. Hanne Grieg Hermansen lives and works in Oslo. You can find more information about Grieg Hermansen's work here .
TF: Can you tell us a little about your artistic work?
HGH: I work as a visual artist with drawing as a form of expression. Formally, I work mainly with pure pencil drawings based on photography, where the technique and the use of time is an important part of the expression. In addition, I work sculptural drawing-based works. Within a relatively tight framework I try to have variation in format, form, technique and mounting.
TF: How do you use drawing in your work? Tell us a little about your work process!
HGH: I use the medium of drawing as a starting point to investigate another medium, with a fundamental interest in both. I tend to work project and cycle based, where I first plan the exhibition as a whole before the individual works are concretized. It is at this stage that I make all the formal decisions, working on themes and looking for a kind of keynote for the whole, and it is these decisions that guide the choice of the photographic starting points. Having chosen the photographic basis for the drawing I transfer it to paper using a light table or projector. Then follows a period that can extend over many months, sometimes years, during which I draw out my response to the photograph.
TF: What inspires you? Do you work from a theme?
HGH: In recent years I have been interested in how the photographic technique can get in the way of the subject that is meant to be photographed, and how this makes the presence of the photographer the actual subject. Often I have used photographic starting points where the apparatus itself is part of the the subject, for example by refraction of light in the lens, hard flash, misfocusing over/underexposure etc. I am interested in the relationship between watching and being watched, being present and not being present at the same time, as well as the use of tools and how these tools work detached from the context in which it is originally intended to be used.
Currently, I am working on refining light as a motif and theme, exploring different ways in which the experience of light can be can be produced using paper and pencil. Time, manual labor, shifting values, illusion and the tipping point between drawing and photography are important components in my artistic work.
TF: What are you currently working on?
HGH: At the moment I am working towards a solo exhibition in Sandefjord Kunstforening that opens August 31, 2018, where I will show a compilation of the exhibition Solen i Granskoven which I have been touring since the fall of 2016, as well as a series of seven new drawings. These new drawings deal with constructed light, where the starting point is a digital representation of a point of light in an empty room, and how the gradation of light changes through seven different settings in the control panel.
Otherwise, I am in the starting phase of a new project that will be shown on Tegnerforbundet in August 2019. Here I continue to work with investigations of engineered light and optical effects, but much is still open at the stage I am in now.
TF: What does drawing mean for you / your work?
HGH: Drawing is both my main technique and main subject matter. The physical physical action of the drawing process has an intrinsic value, where the concentration I achieved by drawing is something I value highly. For me, drawing is both a form of expression and a technical investigation with its own rules. I like the simplicity of the materials paper and pencil, the immediacy and directness of of the pencil, even though the visual expression can be both saturated and complex. The graphite in the pencil interests and fascinates me, the way it can be both glossy and matte, coarse and fine-grained, oily and dry, light gray-white and dark, metallic black, the experience of transparency and depth and the tension between the fine-tuned control and the raw and uncontrolled.
TF: Tell us a bit about your work in the Drawers' Union's sales department!
HGH: I have two jobs in the sales department, Fra Hardangerfjorden and Super 8.
Super 8 is a series of four small drawings based on an 8 mm film that has melted. In old film projectors it is a common problem that if the film for some reason for some reason stops a little too long in front of the light bulb, there is a risk that the heat from the bulb burns holes in the film. The series shows four stages of film melting, almost like a chronological narrative.
From the Hardangerfjord, a larger drawing is based on a wrongly focused photo, where instead of capturing the reflection of light and the beautiful nature of western Norway focus on the dirty, scratched and wet window pane of the ferry from which the photograph was was taken from. Technically, the drawing was a confusing mess to work with. I had to think of multiple layers in the surface that differed from each other to keep my tongue tongue in cheek, but draw everything at the same time as drawing cannot be done in layers in the same way as painting. Foreground and background are organized simultaneously on the surface, and the illusion does not work until you have been at it for a long time and the peculiarities of the different layers are evenly defined. This is certainly one of the most time-consuming drawings I have made.
See the works of Hanne Grieg Hermansen in our online shop. Click here.
