To Each Our Own

To Each Our Own

Own technique on paper · Malexander, Sweden

To Each Our Own, from the series Human, 1998.

The print titled To Each Our Own stands apart from the others in the series. All the rest are vertical. This one lies down.

It shows a woman and a man resting side by side. There is one detail that people notice slowly: both figures are cut off at the legs. Or perhaps an invisible frame is simply covering them.

I no longer remember why I decided not to show their legs in full. Most likely there was not enough material left for the plate. So I cut them both out as they were, and laid them beside each other — she in front, he behind. In perspective their legs would have crossed. Instead they joined. They became a shared point of departure, a kind of root from which the two of them grow.

That is a form of destiny. It makes no difference whether they are turned toward one another or away.

In this image she lies on her back, her head turned slightly in his direction. He lies on his stomach, his face hidden in his hands. Each of them is in a separate world, inside their own thoughts and their own feelings. And still they are held in one shared space.

The situation is not unambiguous. We can only guess at what is happening between them. Every viewer will arrive at their own reading, and their own life will be the thing that suggests it to them.

That is what I want from this work: that it speaks to many people, that it stirs something in them. And that whoever decides to live with it goes on finding new meanings in it, year after year.

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