Fläckar, ord

Texts and art by Karl-Johan Stigmark, 2010

‘transfer of a stain to another place’
In the early nineties I travelled to Budapest, by the Danube, in connection with an exhibition. There I initiated a project where the white correction-color tip-ex was used to cover letters in different books. To begin with, this time consuming work was thought of as a correction of misspelled words, but at the same time a new visual syntax appeared, similar to the writing for blind invented by Louis Braille. Stains and words combined into a cipher, something that pretends to be something that it is not, or that conceals its actual meaning. In this work, ‘transfer of a stain to another place,’ the transfer of something almost insignificant – a stain on a table – is documented. At stake is thus an exploration of the small and often ignored; an attempt to give it another space, a room of its own.

‘mistakes in office’
Blind maps, stains, bruises and other marks, defects, rashes, a pimple, a dab, an ‘accident at the office,’ a left over residue. An observation of something repressed, of the minimal but material and disturbing traces of an accident. Blob, blot, brand, dirt discoloration, filth, fleck, grease, grime, mark, smear, smirch, soil, spot, stigma …

‘late-check-in-pistachio-for-danube-vienna’
Some years later I returned to the Danube, but this time to Vienna, to which I had travelled from my kitchen in Stockholm. I brought with me the word ‘hello’ shaped by pistachio ice cream. The word was placed by the riverbank. In the catalogue text to the exhibition ‘clean and sane,’ Maria Lind wrote: “When he writes well-chosen words and phrases in ice cream, which melts away on the spot, and the smeary stain is left there, the delicious is immediately transformed into something disgusting. It brings up associations to Jean Paul Sartre’s notion of stickiness – that which we cannot wipe away and get rid of in an instant – as something as repulsive as dirt, since we cannot control it. Even small children loathe the sticky. More than that – the borderline between me and the sticky is dissolved and threatens my identity. I don’t know where I ends and the other begins.”’