In 2012 I made a plate for Henning Arp-Hansen and his admission into The Royal Copenhagen Shooting Society.

On that occasion I needed insight into whom and what Henning was, so we went on a hotel tour de force, especially in Copenhagen, in order to test “the product.”

A privilege in my trade is to meet colleagues from different professions, and the hotel industry is interesting as furnishing and decoration should visually signal to the guest partly the character of the hotel and partly make the guest feel at home while being “something else” worth travelling for. It’s a genre of temporary decorations which disappointingly resembles what my craft works with; there has to be a picture on the wall god dammit.

Subsequently I received the challenge; create a H.C.A. sculpture to my foyer in Hotel Tivoli.

H.C.A. is an integral part of us all, I’ve made art works in which he is present, and there are plenty of sculptures with a hat and book.

He was unhealthily occupied with his head when he had his picture taken, and figuratively we have an idea that all these stories came out of his imagination, it was a new concept from Romanticism, and we know giant heads from the Olmec, the Easter Island, Karl Marx in Chemnitz among others, and Pallas Athena is born out of Zeus’ head, so it became a giant portrait of Andersen in bronze with 14 fairytales springing out of his head – whether the art or the hotel won, others will have to decide.