During the winter of the Covid-19 pandemic, Stenram used a handheld scanner to make “surveys” of the furniture in her apartment – dragging, or stroking, the scanner along the surface of the furniture. With each pass, the form changes and grows unfixed. These works from the series Nocturnal Pieces appear as objects that are sagging, falling, losing their shape, form and boundaries, just like sleepy bodies dissolving into the dream state.

"I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share.” - Marcel Proust

For the series Nocturnal Pieces, Stenram investigated sleeping and dreaming. Made while staying mostly indoors during the winter, the series is an exploration of the process of falling asleep; the transformation of active bodies into unconscious shapes surrounded by darkness and night.

The surface of each piece of furniture was scanned twice, and the separate scans were digitally stitched togethr. Each time the form changed, and the 'doubles' are inconsistent. The images were then printed at 1:1 scale.

These images are not soft, yet they are in part inspired by Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, which the art historian Max Kosloff called "comatose objects". These are sleepy pieces, wooden objects that are sagging, falling, losing their shape, form and boundaries.

When we are asleep, memories and recent experiences as well as current noises and smells all get integrated into our dream state. There is a dissolution of the boundaries of the body - we are not so distinctly contained anymore. The scans are perhaps also attempts to grasp impermanence - waking up, dreams slipping out of reach, matter decaying and bodies ageing.

Nocturnal Pieces was first exhibited in the exhibition Cadastral at Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen (DK) and was made possible through an artist's grant from Stiftung Kunstfond / Neustart Kultur.

Night Table Survey (Back)
2021-22
Pigment Prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, mounted on aluminium dibond, stained walnut frame
82cm x 124.4cm (framed size)
part of the series Nocturnal Pieces

“I now belong only to myself, having fallen into myself and mingled with that night where everything becomes indistinct to me but more than anything myself. I mean: everything becomes reabsorbed into me without allowing me to distinguish me from anything, But I also mean: more than anything, I myself become indistinct. I no longer properly distinguish myself from the world or from others, from my own body or from my mind, either, For I can no longer hold anything as an object, as a perception or a thought, without this very thing making itself felt as being at the same time myself and something other than myself. A simultaneity of what is one’s own and not one’s own occurs as this distinction falls away”

Jean-Luc Nancy, from The Fall of Sleep