For the piece ‘Withinwithout’ the area surrounding the gallery entrance was altered so that it was hidden by a tall privet hedge, the type that is frequently used to encircle one-family suburban homes all over Denmark. There was no opening in the hedge, no garden gate, or discreet path letting the visitor through. Standing on tip-toe, or peeking through the branches, one could glimpse a small garden in front of the inaccessible glass doors of the gallery and through them, the exhibition space itself.

What was normally a welcoming entrance to a semi-public gallery space now felt completely private. “Maybe the gallery has closed and someone moved in? Maybe we’re peeping into somebody’s private garden?” A curious look around soon revealed that the gallerist was still working in his office, and that one could enter the space through an alternative backdoor. Passing through the storage room, kitchen and office of the gallery, the visitor could make their way back to the ‘original’ entrance, and look through the glass doors at the little garden, or even stroll out into it, enjoying the green grass and the protection and privacy provided by the hedge. 

But, with no place to sit and no view to enjoy, the garden became another enclosed space, similar to the gallery, and the visitor’s attention became focused on the empty symmetry of the situation. With no culmination or final point of ‘consumption’ (or even relaxation) in either place, both the gallery and the garden seemed to suggest that the other space was the one to be in.

This spatial indecisiveness and ambiguity emphasized the paradoxical nature of the boundaries and borders with which we surround ourselves in order to protect and contain our privacy, which is then often expressed in terms of ‘freedom’. ‘Withinwithout’ delineated and frustrated the viewer’s expectation that the quest for freedom entails an outward gaze toward ‘nature’, (to a garden, vista, or open sky) from the confident, safe, and secure position of somewhere ‘inside’.