How it all started, 2025

So, in September 1984, I went to Pietrasanta together with my friend Kristine Suhr, and met Jørgen Haugen Sørensen just outside the arched gate to Pietrasanta. I had recognised him from a picture in a catalogue some friends had shown me, and asked if he would help us to find a place to work. The same afternoon, we were both set up at his workshop in Valdicastello, with a block of stone each.

Jørgen recommended me I go to Barcelona instead of applying to the Danish art academy. This I did, the same winter, with a backpack full of recommended books, from Joyce, Proust and Strindberg to Tjekhov, Jacobsen, Virginia Woolf and Julia Barnes - just to name some from the long list of classics, which became the basis of  another kind of education I got, other than the one I had planned.

I knew no one in Barcelona and did not speak the language either, but after six tough months I had found a place to live and a place to work.

It was in Barcelona that I learned to be alone and found the necessary peace and concentration to get started. It was also here I taught myself to model, and to explore my own sculptural language.

Jørgen came to Barcelona from time to time and made small, very precise models in the studio. I came to understand what monumentality meant when I saw how these models later became refined sculptures carved in granite.

It wasn't like Jørgen taught me how to model, because he believed it was better for me to find my own way. When he came to see what I had done since last, I just got an encouraging "excellent" or "just keep going". The only thing he recommended me to do was to model organically and I followed this advice because it was natural.

Life in Barcelona lasted for about 10 years until our building in Carrer Sant Pau was demolished, due to city planning in the late 90s. By then we already spent half of our time in Italy. Villa Simi became the base where we returned from many travels. Each had a studio in the house, we had dogs and parrots and continued to live and work together until Jørgen died November 2021.

For the last 12 -15 years I have taught modelling in yearly workshops, mostly at Bornholm’s Art Museum, but also at my own studio in Italy. Teaching others helped me understand what I actually knew. Putting words together, like this little text, is to me the best way of thinking. Writing is to me a natural companion to making sculpture.

Eli Benveniste