Teaching A photography degree and years in the commercial world mean I bring something into the classroom that isn't in the curriculum.
In visual arts I want students to find a medium that feels like theirs. Not every student will love painting. Some will discover printmaking, or photography, or cutting paper. My job is to give them enough techniques that something clicks.
A lot of what I do is quiet mentoring — sitting with a student, asking a question, nudging them slightly away from the safe and the literal. Most students default to what they already know how to make. I'm interested in the moment just past that — where something more personal, and more abstract, starts to come through.
I practise myself. I make things, evaluate what worked and what didn't, and come back to it.
I have also developed workshop material for Alinea (Danish digital teaching platform) — designing and building complete courses from initial idea through to finished material.
Click on Alinea to view a recording of the courses.
STUDIO WORK
I make things to understand them. A lemon drawn twenty times is not the same lemon. A leaf painted in blue is not the same leaf.
This is work from my studio in Dronningmølle — drawing, printmaking, watercolour, monoprint, mixed media. All of it feeds back into the classroom.
Studio Notes — Blue
One colour. Three materials. Three different blues. & one photograph.
Gouache on the leaf — slow.
Pen for the cut shapes
— precise.
Posca for the flower — fast.
Re-flection on a blue car doorStudio Notes — Shapes
I love a good stationery shop. In Milan I had bought a set of ink pens — the colours were reason enough. And a small notepad with squares. Back in the studio, they were sitting on the desk together and it felt obvious.
The shapes came from the colours as much as anything else. Each pen had its own weight, its own way of filling a form. The squares underneath gave everything a quiet structure — visible but not insistent.
These are not studies for anything. They are what happens when good materials find each other.
Studio — Drawing ObjectsI draw the things around me.
A plant on the windowsill. A bag I love. It doesn't have to look exactly like the thing — that was never the point.
Observing closely and then allowing yourself your own interpretation — that is what I try to bring to my students. So I keep practising it myself.
