Torgrim Torve works with things. Things like sculptures, form and themes. Nothing can become anything until you do something. A thought is nothing. A thought can be a sketch of a thing. An idea is not a thing. But it’s hard to make a thing without an idea. Fortunately, we have materials so we can let the material take responsibility for the idea. Materials are always a little smarter than the person trying to do something with them. Materials can quickly get it in their mind to do something completely different than what the artist wants. If the artist doesn’t listen, the result can quickly become scrap. Scrap is fine too, but the artist doesn’t always want to create scrap so they have to listen.
“If I concentrate as hard as I can, so that it throbs in my temples and everything turns a little reddish-pink, then I think maybe I can hear the sound of a thing or its future shape. At least if I already think I have a very good picture of what that sound or shape could be. This is how I want to press my sound into things. Or push its future form out of a thing. Even though I have a vivid picture of what that thing could become, I have not heard it yet.
One time as a child I thought that if I rubbed my eyes so hard that I got lightning in the darkness in my head – then I could look into the future and learn something from the universe that no one else knew. Of course it was just streaks and lightning-like yellow and red flashes that in themselves didn’t look like anything other than a kind of light, but in the hieroglyphs I saw, I believed there must be something important – as far as I knew, no one else did the same thing as me. So there had to be something there. I didn’t know what, but it had to be something important. I was convinced that there must be something there that the universe wanted, but I had no way of understanding what it could be. This is a bit the same as pressing sound out of things; you know it has a sound, it just isn’t audible yet and then someone has to press just a little harder”.
Torgrim Torve is a visual artist and musician from Hamar who, since 2013, has been part of the artist group Verdensteatret. There he has performed on stage and produced sound, instruments and mechanical constructions that do things, or do nothing more than look strange.
Text: Torgrim Torve
Translation: Glen Farley