Ingvil

In 1995, I recorded some video footage of grave flowers in a New Orleans cemetery.¹
At the time, I was a student at the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen. It was there, in a 1992, where I first met and befriended Ingvil Aarbakke – a Norwegian fellow art student. We both graduated in 1997.

In 2005, I was shocked by the news that Ingvil – whom I hadn’t seen for a few years – had died at the age of thirty-five.

In reaction to the news, I created a video called – Dust Anthology – using the above-mentioned footage. However, I was unhappy with the result, and abandoned the video – considering it to be too maudlin compared to my bright memories of Ingvil.
Nonetheless, I had become familiar with the footage, and had a title I liked.
I must point out that the word – Anthology – is derived from the Greek word – Anthos – meaning Flower. An anthology is therefore a metaphoric collection of flowers. While on the subject of the title, the Dust refers to Genesis 3:19: “for dust you are and to dust you shall return”.

Nothing is as beautiful – and as sad – as a vase of flowers. It embodies the essence of our earthly existence.

Of course, each of the ten thousand things around us – including ourselves – shares the same destiny. That awareness, is the origin of the Japanese phrase – Mono No Aware – the pathos of things – or the Virgillian – Lacrimae rerum – the tears of things. To name but a few.

But here we must ask ourselves: Is the cup half empty, or is it half full?
Are we going to mope around feeling sorry for ourselves? Or are we going to look and listen and reach out to the world around us and enjoy the stunning spectacle? Of course, I’m not advocating some sort of hedonistic, superficial, pleasure-seeking either. Instead, there is also the Middle Way, or The Way – key concepts in Buddhism and Taoism.

The Tao – a short summary

The Tao is both infinitely abundant and pure emptiness. It is the source of all existence from which everything springs and to which everything returns. It is the underlying process of Nature, of Reality. It’s energy – the Qi (Chi) – symbolised by the dragon – is the energy force which flows through all things. By letting go of extremes – finding balance between opposing forces – one can tap into this energy of the Present – the Now – and go with the flow.

For the past few years, I’ve been exploring and discovering Chinese painting². I realised that most – if not all – Chinese art, is imbued with the spirit and concepts of Taoism or Buddhism.
For example. In all those magnificent paintings of mist-shrouded bamboo branches, mountain peaks, or landscapes – created by strokes, dabs, and washes of ink on the white, empty surface of paper; it is indeed the misty emptiness of the paper which represents the Tao – from which things appear and into which things disappear.
Emptiness, in this conception, is not some sort of nihilistic, anti-matter. It is the generative substrate, or matrix – from which everything emerges, and – at the end of physical manifestation – that things return to again. It is, to quote Helmut Brinker’s marvellous phrase – the Plenitude of Emptiness.

I have found that visual metaphor very useful in understanding the co-existence of being, and non-being – life, and death.

Of course, in the European painting tradition, the works of many great artists are also imbued with the awareness of the tenuous hold that we have on existence.³

One can only marvel at the miraculous transformations of objects, say – leaves, stems and petals – into brush strokes, dabs and smears. Seemingly insignificant layerings and clusterings of paint – literally creating something out of nothing – appearing out of the blank canvas like Jenga constructions of tone and colour – like the house of cards in the painting by Chardin. ⁴

Some weeks ago, I came across a sublime facsimile edition of William Turner’s last sketchbook. I found his absolutely economical use of watercolour strokes and washes in his sketches totally breathtaking. It reminded me again of the contemporary critic of Turner’s – John Hazlitt – who disparagingly described his work as: “Without form and void… Pictures of nothing, and very like”. ⁵

Describing masterpieces by the 13th century Chinese painter monks – Muqi, and Yujian – Max Loehr describes them thus: “In sum, there are no complete shapes of any sort. They are dissolved into shreds of visible matter”.

Inspired to create a graphic video, based on these ideas, I started searching my archive for potential material. By pure serendipity, I discovered the original version of Dust Anthology again.
Upon watching it, I was shocked to discover that the twentieth anniversary of Ingvil’s death was fast approaching. How could that possibly be? In, what felt like the blink of an eye, twenty years have passed.

In the blink of an eye – In Ictu Oculi – is another phrase, like Memento Mori – which has death looming large over it.

Thinking about video as medium, a single video frame lasts a fraction of a second – literally for the blink of an eye. What could be more ephemeral? 
Yet, one frame is replaced by the next, and the next, and the next, and the next – an almost unstoppable, bountiful surge of images with an electric energy akin to the Tao.

I constructed the music out of fragments from a series of audio experiments I made in 2014. Like some sort of hyper drum-and-bass, with thrashing, flailing hi-hats and cymbals splashing colours into existence. With incessant pulses of bass drums and cascading waves of snare rises. Burgeoning forth with the energy dragon flow of Qi. Something good to remember Ingvil by.

Konrad Welz
Bracknell, 16 November 2025

Footnotes

1: Some of this footage also appears in my video Image and Pilgrimage

2: For readers interested in learning more about Chinese painting, I can wholeheartedly recommend the monumental series of videos which James Cahill recorded before his passing.

3: But, more often than not, it tends towards a negatively-charged, memento mori trope.

4: Having mentioned Chardin, some of my other favourite artists in who’s work I recognise this awareness more in the Taoist sense, are: Morandi, Twombly, and of course Cezanne. However, in the context of images of flowers and still lifes which ultimately inspired this video, the list is almost endless. Stretching from Anna Atkins to Francisco de Zurbaran, by way of Blackadder, Claesz, Corinth, Courbet, Dürer, Fantin-Latour (through Peter Saville), Manet, Schuch, etc. etc. etc.

5: A form I’ve aspired toward ever since I first heard Luc Ferrari’s – Presque Rien No.1 and John Cage’s – 4’33” as an eighteen-year-old.