The first thing I sculpted was a hotdog in clay. I still do, sometimes; it’s my ‘thank you’ gift for people that help me out. My first interaction with plaster was during a late night in art school. I have a tendency to not ask for help so I didn’t really know what I was doing when I put my hands in a bucket of setting plaster while trying to cast them. I got stuck and had to violently bang my hands against the floor to get them out. Five years later I tried again.

Everything is made by hand so I spend a lot of time in the studio. Sawing, carving, sanding. I've got a Japanese fish knife that is perfect for cutting Styrofoam. Without that, not much would get done. A lot of my best tools are from the kitchen, actually. I don’t cook so it all ends up in the studio. I wouldn't survive without my Seamless app.

My interest in classical sculpture awoke rather late. I took it for granted, as I imagine is the case of most people living in European cities. To me, the aesthetic was something... well, nice looking, but at the same time, almost invisible – the perfect white surface, the idealized bodies. I felt the aesthetics of classical sculpture were burdened with out-dated values and reminders of injustice. Something I interpreted as a very clear back then.
After a lecture in art history about melancholy and the myth of Narcissus, my eyes opened up to the current themes in this ancient story about one individual’s obsession with oneself. This was around 2008 and I had just got my first iPhone. The selfie boom had started taking off. I was more or less glued to my smartphone’s camera for years. Looking back, I do believe this was an important period for me, realizing that ‘new’ and ‘now’ is relative. About a year later, I found myself sculpting my first girl: she had a T-shirt on with the text Born 2 Die on its back. Very drama, a perfect narcissist.

I do think it is interesting how far you can go, how much you can push and what you can get away with as long as you are talking a quite traditional language. Let me explain: by flirting with the aesthetics that most of us in the western world agree on as high-quality, intellect and high art, the content and the politics of the work can spin off to a place further away from the comfort zone without you not really noticing. It’s like a Trojan horse to me.

I believe most of the pros lie in the way size helps the work act out. I feel the large-scale emphasizes an empowerment of the figures in my work. The cons are purely practical, hard and heavy to handle, more difficult to transport and so on.
Scale as a message? Yes! Height is immensely powerful, don’t you think? For example, just by looking up or down on somebody in a conversation sets the way you relate to one another and builds up a power dynamic (among other things, of course). I use that to establish a relationship and a hierarchy in between the viewer and my sculptures. So that you, when you enter an installation with my work, somewhat experience that feeling of walking into a social setting. Having thoughts about what you see but also about your own interaction. The work sees you back, so to speak.

Yes, that's what I consider my most important skill: the ability to create something similar to a human interaction in between a person and a chunk of plaster.

When I began working with the figure I was quite dependent on photographs. It was sort of a revolution for me when I started bringing over my fashion magazines to the studio. Until then I felt as though fashion was not art-world approved, they were two different worlds to me. I also work with models (aka partners and friends). The models have been both male and female, which is an important aspect in that the sculptures have an androgynous anatomy.

I would give my left arm for Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

A body of new work for Art Basel exploring what I started in my latest show at Company Gallery here in New York.