The first mark belongs to an animal, the second to a hand, the third to a machine, and the material holds all three without ranking them. The result is a body of work produced through attention to what was already there, in which making is understood as the act of carrying a form carefully from one state to another.
Et Arrangement is a collaboration between the architects Laura Storbjerg and Lærke Dorthea Reid Harder Rasmussen. The duo works between drawing, digital scanning, and casting, in a practice organised around transcription: a mark is found in the material world, carried through a sequence of media, and delivered into a form that holds the memory of every stage it passed through. The method belongs to their training, where a drawing is understood as an instrument for moving one condition of matter into another.
The Speculum series begins beneath the bark of a centuries-old oak tree, where wood-boring beetles leave a record of their passage. Storbjerg and Rasmussen photographed their marks, traced them by hand on paper, digitised them, CNC-milled them into wood, and cast them in tin. The title names the alloy from which mirrors were cast before silvered glass, and the sequence gives the work its terms: a surface arrived at through five translations, each one faithful to the last and each one a departure from it.
The moulds are not discarded. In recent work the milled oak returns as relief, exhibited as three triptychs, so that the negative form is granted the same standing as the object it produced. What was a stage in a process becomes a work with its own account of how it was made, and the sequence is shown to run in both directions.
The position this produces is one of distributed authorship. The first mark belongs to an animal, the second to a hand, the third to a machine, and the material holds all three without ranking them. The result is a body of work produced through attention to what was already there, in which making is understood as the act of carrying a form carefully from one state to another.