Maren Karlson is a drawer and painter currently based in Los Angeles, USA. Her interests include sorcery, snacks, feelings, metamorphosis, girls, and planet earth.
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. (...) In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. (...) We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Images & text from --
Maren Karlson
Happy Dark
May 19 – June 18, 2017, Interstate Projects
"Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers (...), like hands joined together, like the end and the way.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)
“The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” (Hildegard von Bingen)
"Only the mercy of god could yank me out of that terrible indifferent joy in which I was bathing, complete. For I was exulting. I was coming to know the violence of the happy dark - I was happy as a demon, hell is my maximum." (Clarice Lispector)
———————————————————————————————————————
Crawling underground... crawling underground… too well I know I'm like the snake who eats the dust! I am in the dark; I feel at home in the deep void, a dim grotto, filled with lucid waters, smooth and still, flat, unbroken by waves, uncanny. I am in the deepest, darkest heart of a gigantic mound of rooms and paths, and its radiant, moist interior speaks to me. It asks me to come close, to let myself be embraced by its gloomy warmth. I speak its language better than any mortal man's language, like an old, dusty rose laying in the mud speaks to me more than one thousand jewels. Like long-lost sisters, we gently touch each others spheres. Within me, an unfathomable alchemy begins – Everything I have ever known is now surrounding me; I have come to the velvet pond of renewal, the iron woman is finally melting. Giving up the search for permanent truth – my spirit will be eternal, there is no ending to my solitary journey, no arrival; eternal deconstruction followed by eternal reconstruction. No being has ever seen the true face of life until she has lifted the veil of oblivion to see her self rise: forever vulnerable, yet powerful and frightening.
*
www.marenkarlson.com