About

Ingvild Eiring is based in Oslo, Norway, making her living as a costume designer for films. On her spare time she is a miniature artist creating dioramas, and an art model, collaborating with photographers around the world.

Contact: ingvild.eiring@gmail.com

Essay by George Pitts.

(He wrote this piece for my photobook “Chasing Cats”, 2014).

Ingvild is a captivating presence, possessed of a daring and quality of taste that attracts a wide-ranging number of photographers across the world. She gravitates toward certain photographers I imagine, due to their reputations, or the level of artistry exhibited in their work. But I also assume that there are photographers who want to photograph her so badly, that their obsessiveness is something of a turn-on. Like a number of the female models who embrace a nomadic itinerary in the course of traveling throughout the world, to be photographed nude, naked or partially clothed, exquisitely or in safe debauched abandon, Ingvild is often captured in a kinetic ethereal light, which complements her ideas about beauty, and specifically her awareness of how beautiful she tends to look in black and white photos that exaggerate the mysteries of her emotional capacities, and heighten the dreaminess of the images. Ingvild enacts the visual dynamic of the photographer’s will or her own creative agenda to be depicted in a range of shadings both heavenly and visceral, which externalize her aesthetic urge to soar within the confines of the body.

Ingvild of course also embodies the often dark, consciously lurid opposite of her ethereal leanings, seeking out those male and female talents who recognize that she enjoys submitting to forceful direction, extreme sensations, and the shameless literate play of degradation that plunges her being into the twisted revelatory darkness suggestive of the inner yearnings that compel her to submit to intense erotic scenarios, that paradoxically uplift her complex sensual passion into the realms of oblivion described by the Marquis de Sade, or implied by the more decadent reveries of a Helmut Newton, or advocated by the resolutely transgressive female thinkers such as Catherine Breillat, or Madonna, who commemorate the female body, its quicksilver charm, and broad disruptive impact on pedantic assumptions of normalcy.

Ingvild often refers to the vision of director David Lynch, as a paradigm for the brand of work that she longs to experience, whose cinematic world intoxicates her with its pitch-black hedonism, torrid romantic anguish, and oblique poetic horror. One might rightly characterize the variety of styles represented by the photographs taken of her, as a surrealistic panoply of moods, creative flights, personal dares to herself, a wish list of perils, or menu of agendas that chart the ever deepening pool of immersions into her imaginative desires.

She serves the sittings like a trained operatic body machine, or instrument to be tuned and attuned to the frequency of the artist’s prerogative.

It is perhaps in her openness, and the admission of her pleasure in submissiveness that the photographs of Ingvild convey their most challenging and seductive moments of eroticism.

Or.

It is perhaps in her refined intuitive sophisticated ability to engage photographers of differing levels of intensity, who perceive her generously in accord with her wishes to surrender and bare herself in their myriad depictions, that specific kinds of pictures emerge, which range from artfully timeless wet-plate images, sweet witty or comedic nudes, dreamlike nudes that appear almost transparent in their ethereal motion, sensitive or provocative narrative tableaux, the countless intimate portraits shot in bedrooms or domestic interiors, and the clearly erotic series projects, which she has collaborated on with me, and other comparably engaged artists.

Apart from the world of photographers, Ingvild would have made an ideal model for both Picasso and Hans Bellmer alike; the former, in his protean and often scabrous transformations of his female muses into hybrid things emblematic of his mania; and the latter, for his rigorously clinical tendency to fetishize the erotic sectors of the female body. One can imagine Bellmer as being the more polite in his formal investigation of abject depravity; whereas Picasso might disguise or obscure the darkly inventive workings of his psyche, only to have them manifest more powerfully and surprisingly in monstrous distillations of his domineering hubris. Either way, these artists would find in Ingvild a pathway to their urges to both destroy and reassemble the vividly arousing power of her sexuality and beauty.

If Ingvild has a mission to satisfy in being photographed so extensively, it is unknown to me, yet nonetheless made manifest in the signs left by the photographs she inhabits. Her warm nature invites a reciprocal response in imagery, however charged or beyond the typical boundaries determined by thoughtful caution. She encourages risk and experiment, curious to see what she looks like when she relinquishes control to the willful intention of the artist. She enjoys the careful negotiation with the artist when less traveled ideas crystalize into disturbingly gorgeous pictures. Her tolerance for conceptually dirty aggressively manic yet compelling representations of her self is balanced by her innate elegance, and pleasure in also making quiet subtle earnestly delicate profoundly feminine images.

Ingvild has from the beginning when I first met her, struck me as a kind of actress, a superb photographic actress, highly responsive to direction, and within the context of my work, capable of deadly alluring expressions and the sustained fixed stare of a femme fatale. She’s also gifted at a visual pathos that looks stylish and highly photogenic. Her assured performativity animates the collaborative work we’ve done; a result of trust, a shared sense of fun, her fearlessness toward being in sexually provocative pictures, and a genuine desire to produce good photographs.

Ingvild’s body is a promised land, her mind a vault of discerning nuances. Her photographic self is penetrable and restless for consummation. In those images that expose her hearty appetite for pleasure, she is a siren drawn to the flame of photography, and its power to enlarge her illusion into a spectacle of passionate engagement with the world’s furies.

George Pitts, 2014