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In 2001 I hopelessly and cluelessly graduated from art school. From all the things I was lacking, everything that prevented me from actually making art, the most pressing one was having no clue of what art meant to me. From those first months I have very few memories - having coffee with friends, Saturday nights out and swimming in the lake - but they might as well have happened years before, or after. The grey nebula of those months accumulated in a series of nearly empty drawings that seemed as pale and meaningless as my own gloomy existence in that period. The result was paradoxical because it was exactly the quality of these empty drawings to reflect my own inner emptiness that made them so filled with meaning for me. The first drawings consisted of white empty rooms with large windows that filled complete walls. Outside was nothing and the walls existed only because of the faint shadows they casted onto the floor and themselves. These rooms became very appealing to me and the drawings quickly accumulated into a series of spaces where I desired to be, or rather ‘unbecome’. They provided a place where I could hide from the question what I wanted with my work and where I could erase the emptiness of my imagination. This feeling was so intoxicating that I spent every free minute of the day in my studio, producing dozens of drawings a week. Slowly, the blurring between my own reality and the one in the world that was growing in the ever-expanding series of drawings started to unfold all around me. The drawings began to bare strange similarities to my studio space and the building where it was located - an old, partly abandoned warehouse. I tried to keep the studio as clean and empty as possible, leaving its nearly 100 square meters largely untouched, reducing it to purely architectural space. For a while it inspired a new surge of creativity, but I quickly realized that it hadn’t sufficiently created the effect I was looking for; I felt I had to raise the stakes a little further. Since the warehouse was scheduled to be refurbished into luxury yuppie apartments I took a chance and asked permission to take down a wall and install panels that would conceal two messy corners. Eventually permission was granted and I set out to further sculpt the studio space to make it resemble the world I was drawing even closer. I painted all walls immaculately white and installed extra lighting. A strange new world started to emerge in my studio, one that existed in two dimensions: my drawings and the reality they mirrored. The panels had not only brushed away the last bits of architectural noise, but also created two large uninterrupted walls that finally enabled me to increase the size of the drawings. The largest paper I could find was 1,5 meter wide, on 10 meter long roles. I spread the papers over nearly the entire width of the walls, approximately 7 meters long each, and started working on two nearly life size drawings that precisely reflected their perspectives, or points of view, on my studio. After the adaptation of my working space in the image of my drawings, reality literally bounced back into the drawings and the visual dialogue between both worlds further intensified. The transformation of the spatial dimensions of my studio now also required for me to adjust the time dimension. Working on the reconstruction of the space as well as the immense drawings had intensified the project to such a degree that it demanded every bit of time I could spare. I decided to put a bed in the studio and, for the time being, to stay there. It enabled me to work for straight hours in between sleeping. The effect was more disruptive then I had imagined. I reduced sleeping hours to around five to six hours a night and gradually shifted my working time later and later, up onto the point that I would work the entire night, sleep during the morning and get up at noon again. It was partly for practical reasons, some of the spaces I was drawing had artificial light, but mostly because working at night helped to narrow consciousness down to the most basic level. Thoughts disappear from the mind and the world is reduced to only time and space, the single components of my drawings. It also helped me to cast away all other disturbing aspects of my life: social visits to friends and family, birthdays, weekends out and domestic concerns such as administration, talking to the neighbours and cleaning the apartment. I had become both the creator and single inhabitant of a world that existed in between art and reality. The borders of my life had now completely melted into the world I was drawing.

I lived in bliss for nearly four weeks until one night, rather abruptly, I realized that I had scraped off myself more than I had. Life had been a spiral spring that I had stretched as far as I could and now that I didn’t have the strength to hold it any longer it violently bounced back. I slid back into my old comfortable routines and within no less than a few weeks I was telling my friends about this magic period the way boring adults reminisce about their wild days when they were young. Even though it marked the end of an extremely intense period, I was nowhere near giving up the drawings and the imaginary world that was growing inside them. Returning to my old routines, however, did mark an important stylistic change, a tipping-over point where reality and fiction slowly returned to their normal dimensions. After the initial minimalist phase, the rooms in the drawings became more and more complex. Floors, entresols and elaborate frameworks for windows were added. An outside world began to appear. Faintly, at first, only in the form of shadows casted onto the walls - leaves and branches of trees, constructions outside of the rooms, terraces and jetties. Slowly the outside world began to take shape in its physical form as well. At that time I was preparing for an artists’ residency in Finland and, simultaneously, large forests started to appear outside the windows. The rooms began to bare similarities to Alvar Aalto houses and small wooden constructions showed up in the corners. Many of the drawings were still variations of my studio, but it had borrowed some elements from an island house Aalto had designed. I found a slide in the library with a photo of an archipelago scenery of the same area. By projecting it on the drawing I could make an exact copy so that instead of the grey office buildings, my studio would now have a view over the Turku archipelago. Again, the rooms were the backdrop against which I played out my desires. But this time the setting was real and a month later I was on the ferry from Stockholm to Turku, meandering through the same islands I had imagined so lively in my drawings. A process seemed to have started in which the rooms took shape and identity, and began to live in a physical and social context. What I know now is that the opposite was true; I was destroying the rooms and the world they manifested. Drawing by drawing it seemed to expand and grow in size and detail, but in fact with every new room I made up that world was crumbling further and further. It took a few weeks for this slow-motion demolition to be completed and by that time the rooms were so filled with reality that they were impossible to escape to and hide inside. Ironically, the last rooms contained scaffold constructions. Again, at that time it seemed a very constructive addition to the spaces. A way to express the need for progression and change and even though they seemed to grown organically into the space, as if they were born out of it, their only purpose was to support the final stages of the destruction. Attempts to return to the earlier minimalistic style of drawing died in vain. They were like souvenirs of a glorious past and were powerless in their attempt to restore that moment. Worse than that, they were decorative. Not in a kitsch, baroque kind of way, the drawings were simply too empty for that, but in the sense that they attempted to create an ‘effect of emptiness’ and simulated an environment that would evoke such an emotional experience. When it all started, the rooms had provided me a place to hide from reality and build one of my own and by the time that new reality started taking shape the desire to disappear had expired. The rooms had developed into the outlines of a new artistic reality that had no need for empty spaces. Shortly after my arrival in Finland I began building a physical scaffold that I used as a tool for collaborations. The installation was variable in shape and size and I invited artists and designers to develop concepts for placement and application, which led to several site-specific installations. The process of destroying the rooms had now turned into a crusade against all emptiness and my new mobile artwork could be installed at any place to fill it with meaning or, if that didn’t quite come off the ground, simply fill it with presence. As if there wasn’t enough of that already. Even though a new creative horizon had emerged I missed my rooms enormously.

Today it seems like an irony that much of my current work deals with the relation between art and reality, since the drawings I made in that period were the only works where I established a profound relation between my own art and my own reality. The existence of the rooms was paradoxical however. They were never drawn to provide a permanent residence. Their existence was negated to mine and the more they took shape and blended in with my life the further they disappeared. I archived around thirty drawings, a selection that grew thinner every time I moved from studio or apartment. I don’t remember when the last ones disappeared, it must have happened in a period when I utterly despised them for the fact that their only relevance was to provide a place for personal escapism, which I thought to be a purely selfish and illegitimate as art works. I had moved my territory to the public spaces of this world, a new realm where I was thrilled by the sensation of political debate and the dynamics of the street. It was a world that had no interest in private futilities; it was burning with real problems. Nowadays, my feelings about throwing the drawings away are ambivalent. I miss them, but at the same time I take comfort in the fact that their physical destruction was necessary to finalize the work. Deprived of their meaning and ‘raison d’être’, they became empty vessels drifting in their white perpetual world. Writing this text was necessary though. It’s some kind of proof that they existed and gives closure to the fact that my relation with them had to end in such a cruel manner.