Behind mine, she hangs
- an essay about a garden
This is an essay about a garden, plural art worlds and an archive. About what it means to hold on and to let go. My grandmother’s work sits in two dusty IKEA boxes, and through them, I try to understand how memory becomes material. In the garden, there were always gatherings, strange and unplanned, like dandelion seeds blowing in from elsewhere. It was here my grandmother lived, painted, and swore, a place where laughter and melancholy co-existed.
Drawings, Ann-Lise Drescher, Dates Unknown
The Garden
My grandmother, Ann-Lise Drescher, was someone people truly adored. A woman best described as a kind of misplaced bon vivant, it felt like every time I dropped by her garden unannounced, there’d be these obscure gatherings, where white wine flowed, cheeses reeked and brushes were swung. These were some of my first encounters with what I now understand as the art world, they were the cliché of the clichés, they were funny and dumb but proved to be the softest of introductions to the world I now drag myself through day to day. Once I remember passing by on a hot summer day, I was with my then girlfriend who always carried around a camera, and the old ladies would pose so naturally in their royal summer hats.
I remember giggling as she shouted profanities at other drivers on the main road, calling them Danish swear words difficult to translate. How her informal way of being formal made you become engrossed in her being: I think the centre of the universe was there in that little garden for a while.
When I had to do an internship at my production school, a place for those in between ambitions, I chose to spend it with her. I was in a period of my life where I had just started painting in small sketchbooks, quit gymnasium ahead of time, was in mild terms drifting. My reason for choosing that was mostly because I thought I could slack off, but she got me started on making colour chart wheels and asked me to paint things that were in front of me. I found comfort in that, someone wanting me to do better.
That lasted until around midday, when we both felt like drinking gin and tonics instead, so we got a little tipsy, I continued drawing in my sketchbooks and we both pretended to go to bed early.
The next couple of days, we resumed the same ritual because it worked in both of our favour. During one of our conversations, I had told her that she would often choose darker tones, which could come across as a bit melancholic. It had stuck with her, and she had grown increasingly sad, until she burst out to tell me that she couldn't wear colours any more because she had become an old grey hag.
Drawings, Ann-Lise Drescher, Dates Unknown (Around 1974)
A to B
When I heard that there was a possibility that I could take care of my grandmother's archive of her work, I immediately got a slap in the face from the long arm of intuition. Quite fast, I felt an incredible urge to somehow include her work with mine. I had a strong feeling that our work could coexist, because they stem from the same seeds.
I am certainly not the only one dragging my ancestors and family into my work. Bringing nostalgia and melancholy into one’s practice is never straightforward: what is imbued more in those themes than the involvement of your grandparents in your language vocabulary? In 2023, I initiated working with my Italian grandfather, Adriano Noro, as well. During the project, I discovered that through working on collaborative artwork, we can, despite how well we think we understand each other's ways of being, discover so much more: it’s through the familiar that we might touch upon the unfamiliar. By bringing your work into the context of people that aren't necessarily involved in art by appearance, the chance of opening up to new discoveries increases. Art is the promise of potential bridging.
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What does it then mean to bridge in art? A bridge binds point A to B, it's a point of departure and return. It cuts through the air and like elephant trunks it pushes its way across the less desired water ways. Bridges can be immense structures, wobbly life affirming slings and the embodiment of melancholy. They are dangerous beings, each bridge is both hazard and horizon.
A bridge might serve as the site where we can have a full overlook of the meeting point of two departures; to bridge, then, is also a collision course, a place to collide.
Drawings, Ann-Lise Drescher, Dates Unknown(around 1984)
Plural Worlds
The two old IKEA boxes, filled with dust and watercolours, needed a little last push outward, tipping into the hemisphere. Perhaps in that dust, there is DNA waiting to be extracted.
It is not so important the family aspect of it, a family is somehow a coincidence, it's a thing given, a lifeline. It's too common. I'm looking for a thing that shapes us all, a thing I can use to examine something larger than what it appears. I don't want to get lost in nostalgia. Painting reeks of nostalgia these days anyways; painters look to the past in search of ways to express their sentiments, seeking guidance in art history, tones of white have long gone sluggish like endlessly reproduced ghosts of themselves, and from this encaustic defamation a new nostalgia has manifested itself in our contemporary painting; a nostalgia, that perhaps forgot about the layers of dirt, dismissing the toll of time, and therefore reproduces a new image of an image already transformed by time.
It feels like every act of holding on is also an act of letting go. By choosing one thing, I inevitably reject another. In my world, things rarely co-exist in harmony; they compete for space, attention, and meaning. In my family, we always somehow competed; we always weighed each other's words and actions. Then there were moments we didn't, tiny glitches that welded us stronger. They would deny this, and I will stretch their importance.
You might wonder what the aim of this text is, then. In truth, it’s paradoxical. I’m trying to write about the need to preserve and care for the past, about why I’ve chosen to hold on to certain things, and why I find it difficult to let go of others. Of course, I cannot get around the theme of the family, both with this text and with the exhibition that I’ve ended up putting together from this blip of a period, though I need to explain that it is more a general idea of family, a general idea of heritage: Maybe I'm proposing that my family holds an art history of its own? By highlighting my own family's role in my personal history with art, I can maybe somehow touch base with all small art worlds, forgotten or isolated throughout time.
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Could we consider that there isn't one but a multitude of art worlds? The idea of a singular “art world” has never sat easily with me. What if there are only art worlds, plural, each constituted in the moment one stumbles across art in the world? Ann-Lise’s garden was one of them, and perhaps by calling it antiquity I’m trying to anchor myself in something that has always been there, a world still being built.
Drawings, Ann-Lise Drescher, Dates Unknown
Crate Diggin’
The first work I got my hands on from the box containing my grandmother's life's work was a presumed self-portrait of my grandmother wearing a surgical mask, lying on a hospital bed: The lady has lost her lower teeth, which appear rendered in an ambivalent isometric drawing, floating in space without context or sense of place. There is a black hole in the surgical mask, and then there are neurotic squiggles where you can glimpse the outline of what could resemble a nurse, a doctor or maybe someone from our family.
I think she must have been on some kind of medication, because the painting is a significant departure from the normal motifs my grandmother made a living from creating: flower patterns, biking children, and Christmas ornaments. It was like striking gold. Not gold as in wealth, but gold as in inheritance: a sudden glimmer of her, of something she hadn’t intended to pass on but did anyway. I realized then that my own practice might also work this way: sneaking up from the edges, arriving uninvited, refusing to not be indulged.
I continued the task of digging through the crates a few days later and discovered a folder of observational drawings done on small pieces of paper, and from the few scribbles written alongside the margins, most were from bars like the Copenhagen upper-class ‘Café Victor’, trips to Greece and South of France. They depict lives and mostly men at bars. It's clear that there’s an artist observing, directing its environment into the mass it wants it to be. The drawings are neatly glued to larger A4 sheets, and they manage to create these complete mood boards; they are very scenic, almost scenographic in the way they have been put together.
Like the hospital drawing, these mood boards stray away from the ‘professional’ practice of Ann-Lise, there is an urge to depict something rougher than plants, birds and children's play. They depict those obscure gatherings that I thought I might have imagined; they depict a social life. I am certainly and very well aware that by reading the works like this I am pushing my own narrative into reading, that's inevitable anyway, but it's hard not to get a feeling that these observations also stood out to Ann-lise, the way they have been arranged and secured in their own designated folder, most of her illustrations works lay loose in the box and have not been granted the same treatment as these. It's so much like her to treat the rough lined works with such grace, perhaps she treated these in this way because they were real in nature; something that she cared for and had lived through.
Drawings, Ann-Lise Drescher, Dates Unknown ( Around 1980 )
The Nursery
Anne-Lise was someone who sprouted seeds in her own garden. She ran her own shop and then she brought others into it. There was an open door for those who wanted to drop by. There was a scent and a special light in the little terraced house.
There was a garden with dying fish and little toads. The birds also liked to drop by from time to time.
There was a psychotic neighbour who came by and scrounged alcohol, only to knock walls down and scream from his side of the fence afterwards. There were good days and bad days.
Basically, we could be those animals, living inside that tiny garden, who on good days, manage to co-exist and carry around the weight of the air we had been assigned from the centre of the universe: I think the centre was there in Hørsholm for a while. There, in that small garden, every little gust carried a chime from the clinging crystal glasses, a resonance that drifted into the sky and rippled outward, as though the whole earth were breathing from its core.
Some days are history-less, so devoid of a story that they quickly sink far out of sight, out of mind. Some days drown in nothingness. Nothingness, an undefined something, an alien sensation. A warmth. A nothing that absorbs everything in its presence. A nothing that consumes, and grows vaster than time, larger than tasks and ambitions. A nothingness that rummages through everything. In that nothing, we sometimes find ourselves. Some day, maybe we will find all of us in that same place. It is in that nothing that everything is equal, all is fair and square. Flat line, for all that matters. It is in this nothingness that we can potentially find the ultimate congregation. Some say, the painting emerges when the painter forgets themself.
Some days start with a loud bang, that's what it's like to be manic: a diagnosis is an attempt to categorize states of mind from the established system. It's an archival practice, one more name to add. Some days I want that piece of paper. Other days I just ride the wave of impulses. Impulses are my driving force to write, paint, collect and think. It's just a restless feeling. It's really a feeling of opposites, because it's either this or that, control is not a thing that I know so much about. When I'm drained, the drawings from my grandmother are suddenly a heavy pile of potential depression. Useless days. An insurmountable task that is always in the corner of my eye, distracting me. The things that some days lead the way are also the things that some days wear me down. It's good to have a load without a load, you would be an empty shell, but with a load, gravity takes effect, it's a physical thing. Memories slowly transform, and as time does the opposite, then it's as if everything revolves around the same things: the wallpaper, the house, the foundation, our own inner cycle.
I remember sensing the same in my grandmother at times.
Drawings, Ann-Lise Drescher, Dates Unknown
Rivers, Bridges and Contemporary Melancholy
What often captivates me in the things I collect and embellish my practice with is precisely that emotional value in them, that they have meant something to someone: it is not always the material itself, but its potential to tell a story about what has happened around that thing which interests me.
I have parallel projects all the time. It's about the layers within those, the overlapping. I have been captivated by something that is constantly branching out. Art is a set of numerous situations that have occurred that are almost impossible to return to, because art is always changing. That is how I see my practice: small shoots on a branch, or the tree itself, sprouting, growing, blossoming and decaying, a cycle that repeats itself over and over again. A tree that vividly wades through the seasons. A tree that stands firm and rises again. Some trees are felled on the pretext that they are diseased.
Melancholy is so very prevalent at the moment. I know that it helps to collect the moments, but it is as if painting cannot capture contemporary melancholy . We cannot accommodate the eternally sad mind. We cannot make room for those who rummage around in nothingness. We archive the feelings, ticking off one more day spent inside these doors.
I don't know what to do with it all yet, neither the archive, the paintings or the feeling. But maybe it's not meant to be dealt with like that. Maybe it should just be left to its own. Beyond the hands, beyond the gaze, into nothing.
Because inheritance is not a straight line; it is a river that keeps breaking into new streams, or small creeks that suddenly gather into a current. My grandmother’s drawings, my own impulses and the archive, they are all part of those forgotten waterways, those subterranean histories that keep seeping back into daylight. Some branches are cut short, others continue stubbornly, bending around obstacles, only to surface somewhere else.
Perhaps my practice is simply this: trying to hold up a few of these waterways, letting them run through me without fully controlling their direction. It is not about separating my art from hers, or keeping the archive at arm’s length, but about accepting that we are both part of the same shifting delta, where melancholy, memory, ornament, and observation drift together.
And if rivers carve paths, then bridges insist on crossings.
David Noro, 2025