Karl Monies

The house has to be able to adapt, like organisms. It has to be as open as possible in order to change the way it functions, otherwise it freezes. And I think good architecture has the quality of being able to adapt and survive during different times. It’s about maintaining the details that make it unique.

We did. It had been kept quite original, so we had to do a lot of surface renovation. It’s not a classical house, but it is quite special—in my eyes, at least. It has closer relations to Berghain than to any other classic family house in the Copenhagen suburbs, and it’s one of the most beautiful houses I have ever been in. The way the rooms are laid out is perfect for us, and I really enjoy settling down here while making it our own over time.

It’s from 1936.

Not really. I decided quite early on that it feels a bit like ananas i egen juice—a Danish expression meaning ‘pineapple in its own juice’—to live with my own art. I need a gap or a distance from what I do professionally when I’m at home. I try to separate the two as much as possible. I grew up in a family where there was no line between private and professional. My parents have always been working with friends and they have close relationships with their business partners, so they were never really off work. And I realised quite early on that this would make my focus weaker and decided that it was not how I wanted to live. It’s still a bit hard sometimes. I’m happy my girlfriend works in another field, so we don’t naturally fall into that pattern.

I love when you’re in a home and the works actually reflect the people living there. I like curating, and I love the fact that there is no right or wrong way of curating your own house. It’s about harmony and disharmony. It’s nice when there is a bit of tension and the dynamic between the works is a bit challenging.

That, on the other hand, is more sacred. It’s somewhere I would not invite everyone. My studio is kind of a lab where I try out different things. It’s quite intimate for me. And I feel very privileged to have the choice and opportunity to design my own days in my studio. I really enjoy my time when I’m not there, and I think of what I am going to do when I am there—then I actually get to put thoughts into action once I’m in the studio.

To me, the studio is holy ground, and one must be careful not to pollute this space where one’s inner, most secret thoughts should feel free to flourish. Whenever you have memories of a space—and the people who have been through that space—you build and work on top of that. That is what I’m trying to do with my studio: to contain good energy and memories and create a safe environment where I can feel free to do whatever I want to do.

It’s like a container, almost, a concentration of all the things that have happened there. Another thing I cherish about it is I have to commute to get there, which enables me to clear my mind, both when I go there and when I leave. People don’t come knocking on the door. You know you’re by yourself—both physically and mentally—which to me is sacred. It’s a productive and meditative space that encourages new ideas. The ideal thing would be to have a studio and to work until it’s full, and then to find a new studio and do the same thing. But seriously, when you go to a new space, your inner landscape also changes. That is how I’ve felt every time I’ve found a new space.

Jewellery is a funny thing, which is something I never thought about growing up. It’s a field that is creative, kind of crafty, kind of artsy, but it’s mostly very surface based. It’s like an accessory without a function; it doesn’t have a purpose besides showing status or power. And I think one of the reasons why I unconsciously chose to become an artist myself was to get a bit more into the grit and contexts of the material. Engage myself in something deeper, basically. Something that could go a bit further than designs, shapes, or colours.

It is something that demands a lot of decision making. I’m happy to have both and to be able to balance and prioritise both differently in different periods of my life. I have had to tune down my own workload a bit, which suits me very well, in a way. There are longer periods between the times I’m going to my studio, which makes the time there much more productive. My girlfriend recently gave birth to our third child, and I am slowly beginning to realise that time becomes much more productive when you have less of it. I like to think of it like music: There has to be silence in between the notes, otherwise it is distortion. And in a similar way I try to maintain the rhythm between being my own little god in my studio, where I decide everything, being a team player and director at Monies, where we are trying to make work together, and finally being a father and a family man, who is neither number one nor number two.

Definitely. I’m lucky enough to have both an irrepressible optimist and a realistic pessimist as parents. We hold the same lack of loyalty towards generally assumed truths. If something has been done one way forever, it’s not only interesting to challenge that action—it’s an obligation to do so. My parents have always found their own ways of doing things, and looking back, I have most definitely inherited that eager stubbornness to go against the tide. When I was younger, I tried to distance myself from my upbringing, but the older I get, the more I realise that I am unknowingly doing the same. Aesthetically, both my parents and I are drawn to what is brutal or big, something that is culturally and visually different. They did something with fine jewellery that I’m now doing with ceramics, without being a ceramist: taking methods from within a craft and then scaling them up or exaggerating and multiplying them. Being a bit foolhardy.      

I was educated as a painter from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, but my first education was working for the Danish painter and sculptor, Tal R. He was my introduction to art and my professor, so to speak, for the first three years of my practice. I always focused on painting for some reason. I think it was my way of moving away from materiality and jewellery and just dealing with images and composition.

Funny question. It was one of those moments in life that comes down to complete coincidence. I was with a friend who met a girl he used to go to school with at a crossroad on Christianshavn in Copenhagen, and I overheard them talking about a guy called Tal. I didn’t know who he was or what he did at that point, but I managed to tell her that if he ever needed a hand, I would be happy to help. And then six months later, I accidentally met her at the exact same crossroad, where she told me that Tal had mentioned—just the week before—that he needed an assistant.

I started working for him for what was supposed to be a couple of weeks. But then weeks turned into months that turned into years, and all of a sudden, I had worked for him for three years. I then started to apply to art academies, and the day I decided to quit coincided with the day he told everyone that he was about to relocate his studio. So, the same day that manifested the end of an era, I had, coincidentally, already planned to start a new path for myself. It also happened to be the period where Tal became quite a big artist. It was not until I started studying in London that I realised how exceptionally big he was. It was an important time in my life, and today we are close friends.

My entrance into doing something functional, something that could be activated, was when I started the Comforts series in 2014. A comfort blanket is a blanket you wrap around infants for them to feel safe. But it is also an English expression for a symbolic object that means a lot to someone. So, this series is made out of blanket-sized textile works onto which I sew different emblems, scout badges, etc.—objects I’ve been collecting over the years—that I then arrange into a new object where their values kind of dissolve. I missed something that was inclusive and relatable in paintings. The series has a lot to do with hierarchies, status symbols, and rank systems, which was a reflection of how I perceived people in London and the different class systems that exist in that city.

Some of the best things you do as an artist happen quite naturally, and it’s not until later that you start conceptualising and realising that it makes more sense than you initially thought.

Just before my first son was born, I had to give up my studio in Berlin and find another place for the months I had left in the city. I was recommended a place that had a lot of crafts facilities, so I went there to explore a new medium for three months. Quite intuitively, I started making vessels and other objects that all function as containers for a material that is kind of omnipresent for the world. When naming my ceramics containers, my intention was to make it about the fundamental principles we—as human beings—have in common when we take clay out of the ground, shape it, burn it, and fill it with consumable goods in order to prolong their lifespan. The climbing rope is something I thought of much later as a sort of Freudian influence in the sense that it’s there to protect the vessel. You grab it by the rope as you would grab on to life. The rope is made for climbing and for keeping you safe when you are suspended above the ground. I see the containers as bodies in many ways. They all have these different postures. And wrapping this life-saving material around the vessels was a way of subconsciously preparing myself to become a father, I think, a reflection of my girlfriend’s body as this container of precious life that I wanted to protect.

I think it has to do with my fascination with time; I love making works that are ‘timeless’ to some extent. My series all have a notion of being somewhat outside of time. So the contrast between the ancient clay and futuristic rope forms a lovely contradiction for me.

For me, the particular aesthetic lies in the variety. The eclecticism of the whole is what I appreciate most in all of my series. In my process, I try to dig my way through history to uncover all the different layers within a particular medium. I always look for something I haven’t done before. If something feels too safe, I would rather go in another direction. David Bowie once said, ‘Turn and face the strange’, and I think that is the core of my entire practice.

I plan, but only to have something to change. It’s hard to change direction without a point of departure. I think I’m chaotic enough to intuitively let go multiple times during a process, to forget the plan. Everyone can follow a plan and succeed, but the golden nuggets come out of an instinct or a fleeting thought in a moment. And you cannot get to that particular point unless you do it. The ethnobotanist and mystic Terence McKenna once said that culture is not your friend. We tend to think, at least in Western society, that culture is something we have to preserve, something we cannot let go of. But it’s also a prison that keeps us from exploring new paths. And I think that is very true. You don’t necessarily need to build on top of anything or accept the norms within certain categories. I need that depth and grounding to really understand what I’m doing, but I also create out of intuitions. Getting lost is the most important step in creating a map.

What draws me to a specific medium is its history and legacy. That there is a certain tradition to work with or work against. To add a question mark to what already exists. But I also think that trying to define what I’m doing goes against the idea of why I am doing it. My works don’t have a box to fit into—that’s what opens up my mind and makes me even more curious about working. However, I think of fabric, for example, as cultural DNA. To me, the fabrics and patterns people use define a culture. Every time I travel, I try to discover a new fabric market and to collect as many different fabrics from as many different places as I can. Today, it has become this omnipresent archive where all fabrics have a previous history. Also, I don’t believe in hierarchies between mediums.

I’m not an expert, but mysticism is like the odd one out in school who is quickly labelled ‘weird’, something or someone you don’t want to touch. But it’s such a big part of all of us— mysticism is all the things we don’t know about. And it’s dangerous to exclude it, I think. If we have a world where we only talk about what we can define and measure, we miss out on a lot. I think mysticism is the core of being an artist; it encompasses everything that is undefined.

No, only in my studio. But I have a lot of them. I think this sort of mysticism is very private to me. I don’t really include many people in it because my idea of it can easily get polluted by other people’s opinions. I use it in a very private way to make sigils and talismans that I send out into the world.

Yes, absolutely. I am not afraid to talk about it, I just don’t know what I would get out of including other people in it.

I think it’s the religious aspect of it. I’m not into football, but I get excited about it when the whole world gets excited about it. There is so much enthusiasm, power, and will going into something that is completely random. I don’t mean to bash football fans, it’s just really interesting to me. It’s like religion: You don’t try out four or five different teams before choosing the one to believe in. It’s something inbred, and that fascinates me a lot. And then I think the football scarf is a funny, symbolically loaded object. It’s like someone decided that the scarf would be our prop, our flag. I also just like its graphical elements, the different fonts and weird symbols. And from that point I like to look at it purely from a designer’s perspective.

I think everything is about camouflage and ambiguity in this respect as well as in society at large. Are you camouflaging or revealing your natural state when you put on a football scarf? You are hiding your individual self at the same time that you are performing your personal belonging in a way. You become one of the trees in the forest.

Not yet. Though I love being in the hallway, which is kind of the heart of the house.

Now that you mention it, I actually think my favourite place is the garden. I love having a garden. My sons and I can go out there and forget about everything for hours. Dig holes, cut trees, plant stuff. The mushroom lamps started as a commission from my gallery, and I like the idea of having a lamp in the garden very much. They are also an homage to psychedelics, a physical manifestation of the mental enlightenment one gains from psychedelic substances. It might also be a reaction to having a garden for the first time in my life and wanting to fill it with functional artworks. I love materials that age with grace. They are made out of copper, which ages with style and gains an incredible layer of protective patina over time.

Actually, I think I would love one!