A R T S T A M P . D K

Thomas Wolsing graduated from the Jutland Art Academy and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen 1999. He lives in a remote part of North Jutland in Denmark and has moved to this area after living in Copenhagen for many years. His work includes installation, textiles and photography.

This artstamp depicts a large needlepoint or cross stitch picture of an old mill placed in a small village near the Northwestern coast of Jutland, in which the artist lives. The mill accidentally burned down and a needlepoint pattern was designed by the artist. Hereafter a woman from the area stitched a large picture before the traces of burnt pieces of wood was removed. Hereby Wolsing raises this burnt down mill to a kind of “Monument”.

Rasmus Vestergaard, Art historian, writes about the project:

Based on digital photographs of old, dilapidated houses in North Jutland, the Danish artist Thomas Wolsing has created a series of embroidered pictorial works. Digital photos are computer manipulated and transformed into pattern paper and then declared to be hand-made old-fashioned needlepoint or cross stitch pictures.

Today, the cross stitch pictures only recycled lined entries and at home in elderly people - but we all know cross stitch pictures traditional rural idyll. Motifs depicting the pond, half-timbered house, old grandfather, the hens who roam freely between the houses. These silent, stylized and kitschy images documenting a bygone era of embroideries had a specific function as craft for women and media for rural people's self-understanding.

By turning the world upside down the motif revives Thomas Wolsing in MONUMENTS ON THE MARGIN embroidery as an artistic medium. The embroidered pictures depicting dilapidated houses.The houses which no one will own or have. The dilapidated monuments as time image resembling a Denmark in transition, on a growing polarization between city and country.

MONUMENTS ON THE MARGIN challenge our understanding of the cultural landscape - how we inhabit it, what is our mental image of "country" and how to take the "country" is actually out today. The specific subjects are all from North Jutland, where Wolsing live. And, the empty and dilapidated properties sculptural sadness is transformed into hand-stitched embroidery of women living in very northern Jutland.