We are successful because we can stay alive…
The young artist Astrid Specht Seeberg believes in life itself – with or without humans, it's up to us.
Young artist on the way...
She is 21 years old, born in Copenhagen, has completed her high school diploma, sailed and lived in Australia for six months, attended post-secondary school in 2016 where she learned to make ceramics and has been doing so ever since. And she has worked as a bricklayer for a while.
It was while she was living in Australia and freediving that she became completely captivated by the space universe that exists beneath the ocean's surface – a strange and different place, with its own life and great beauty.
Corals
Underwater, Astrid also saw the corals that she now represents in her ceramics. Some coral reefs are endangered, and thus the planet loses their important function, which is to create oxygen for the ocean, to be the lungs of the ocean. Large and small coral-like sculptures now come from Astrid's workshop into the world, because she wants us to realize that we must take care of – and show respect for – biological life.
Nature is strong
Astrid believes that humans are a biological success in themselves because we can breathe and stay alive, we are born with everything and in principle don't need more. Technology and the place we are in our world today are not really necessary to keep humanity alive – we are in many ways creating our own downfall.
But what we don't see, but which Astrid thought she witnessed under the sea, was that nature is strong and will probably survive.
Our technology is completely insignificant to the biological universe, we are the ones who are mortal, nature will survive in some form or another because it always starts over in a new system.
Likewise, nature is also too big and untouchable to feel – it is we who feel when Global Warming is destroying our lives. Nature does not feel. It is. And in many ways that is a calming and good thought, she thinks.
To be content in one's habitat
Astrid smiles and says that a fish is content and at peace in its habitat – the sea. It fights for life and fears death, yes, but first and foremost it just exists. It eats, spawns, sleeps, breathes. Nothing else. It doesn't need to do anything else.
Likewise, we humans would benefit from finding peace in our habitat. To find the point where we rest and don't constantly want more, create more, invent more.
At the same time, humans are the only creatures on the planet that invent and create change – it is a need we have, so it is not entirely easy.
Astrid herself definitely has her own habitat in her new large ceramics workshop in Havdrup. She is ambitious, admittedly, but when she is in it, the ceramics, she is at home.
You can see Astrid's ceramics at Kunst for Alle in Aarhus in April 2022.
Follow the artist here: @astridspechtseeberg
The article was published in Kunstavisen in December 2021.