Metamorphoses — Sitters

"Sivert has throughout his artistic career explored different stages in the creation of a work. For some artists, likeness in a portrait is the ultimate goal. A portrait can be perceived as neutral, but it can also bear traces of the passage of time and of inner emotions that manifest in facial expressions.

One of life's most fundamental characteristics is transformation. Is there really anything created by humans or nature that remains unchanged forever? Perhaps, on the contrary, changeability is the most natural thing of all.

This experience is also present in the sculptor's hands when working with a plastic material. But when is a work truly finished? And when is it rather an account of a specific stage in an ongoing process?

Metamorphosis – from the Greek metamorphosis, 'transformation' – denotes a profound change of form or state. The concept is used in several contexts:
• Biology: a radical developmental process where an animal changes its body shape, for example when a butterfly larva transforms into a pupa and then into a full-grown butterfly, or when a tadpole develops into a frog.
• Geology: the process by which an older rock type is transformed into a new rock type, a so-called metamorphic rock, under the influence of high pressure and high temperature in the Earth's crust.
• In a general sense: a more or less complete change of appearance, behavior, or state.
Metamorphosis can thus be understood as the very transition from one form to another – but also as a state where it is not yet clear what something will ultimately become.

One of Sivert's sculptural statements is his self-portrait as a sitting figure, as a body freed from a block. It is not unlikely that Sivert was inspired by the, in our eyes, timeless Egyptian stone sculptures of pharaohs, carved directly from a single block of stone. The Walters Art Museum displays such an example in its virtual collection, Online Collection.

But in Sivert's rendition, there is also something else. The seemingly finished form can be perceived as a stage rather than a final result. The body is freed, but at the same time, it still seems to be in a process of becoming. It is as if the sculpture is somewhere between the block and the finished figure – between the possible and the actual.

Metamorphosis has several related meanings and can be associated with words such as transform, transmute, transfigure, transmogrify, and transmutate. Common to these is the notion that something changes into something else. But metamorphosis also contains a sense of the unexpected: that something suddenly emerges in a new and perhaps surprising form.

In a longer metaphorical series of himself as a 'Sitter', Sivert allows his own figure to transition into the world of Greek mythology and appear as Hygieia, goddess of health, purity, and hygiene. She is the daughter of Asklepios, the god of medicine, and her name has given rise to the word 'hygiene'. Whether there was a conscious association with Hygieia, we can only speculate.

Perhaps it is precisely here that transformation meets chance.

As advertising guru Jan Cederquist (1936–2009) formulated it in the title of his book on marketing: 'Chance is no coincidence.'
Why are you holding this text in your hand at this very moment? Is it a pure coincidence, or is it a 'synchronicity' – a meaningful chance occurrence that somehow relates to your life?

Sivert was the kind of artist who could allow chance to take its place. This is evident in many aspects of his artistry, not least in his 'kofeser'. For him, chance did not merely seem to be something that disturbed or interrupted the artistic process. It could also become a co-creative force.

Chance gives us unexpected insights into one of life's great mysteries: the meaningful coincidence, the strange encounter, the improbable event that suddenly solves a problem or even changes a life.

Perhaps Sivert knew that we live in a world infinitely stranger than we have hitherto believed. A world where nothing truly remains the same, where forms can transition into other forms, where a work can continue to come into being even after it has been considered finished – and where chance sometimes proves to be something more than just chance.

A world that you, too, are a part of, at the very moment you read this text.
/JÖ