PERFECT STATE 2025
Eight casts (120cm x 80cm)
Concrete (B20), Iron, Tar, Water
I depend on the ground but the ground does not depend on me.
perfectstate01
Perfect State location 2
Video 8 minutes
I work with photography as a way of engaging with environments. Over time, this has expanded into a broader material and conceptual practice. I spent my master's years in a studio with an open-air ceiling, where exposure and change affected my work. This experience opened an interest and led me to focus on landscapes and terrains that are unsettled, places that are always shifting, always becoming something new.
I'm beginning to look at how places influence both artistic practice and perception. I'm drawn to landscapes that exist between presence and disappearance, where something remains, but something is also lost. My work often touches on the distance/disconnect between what a place is described as and what it visually presents. It's a way of questioning how we represent and relate to the spaces around us.
Perfect State was first shown at Bergen Kunsthall in 2025. An opportunity to present my practice within a different setting. The outdoor studio, which had long grounded my work, was finally displaced.
The work is something I can take with me with me, yet it remains self-contradictory caught between stability and displacement. It is detached from its origin, yet bears its imprint. A concrete structure can only exist in a perfect state.
“The materials and building systems developed over the past hundred years reflect an ideal of permanence. Steel, concrete and glass were used to conjure a dream of material culture made autonomous of ecology, oblivious to the passage of time. However, the typical lifespan of concrete buildings is around fifty years, much shorter than the potential lifespan of a concrete structure, which can last several hundred years when properly specified and maintained, and can survive almost anything, including earthquakes and nuclear attacks. Concrete has become central to a construction culture with an incredibly high material turnover, in which care and repair have been replaced by demolition and renewal […] Most contemporary buildings are made up of a concrete skeleton, double- wrapped in plastic and foam and stuck together with sticky tape and glue. These buildings can only continue to function in a perfect state. Even small and foreseeable issues can become a major drama, and demolition often appears to be both the most practical and reasonable option.” (Material Cultures. (2022). Material reform: Building for a post-carbon future)
We build upon what we perceive to be stable, relying on engineered control soil testing, reinforced foundations, and groundwater management, but geotechnical challenges remain.
The instability of quick clay, fragile and deceptive, is neither entirely land nor water, a material caught in the tension of in-betweenness. Solid until disrupted, it becomes fluid, collapsing foundations we thought were secure. A landslide occurs when a section of soil, rock, or debris suddenly breaks away from a slope and moves downhill. When it happens, the ground shifts and flows like a wave of loose earth and rock; it doesn’t stop until it meets an obstacle. Afterwards, the area is left with visible traces of movement and a large mass of displaced debris. A total of 163 documented landslides of various types have occurred in Norway from 1701 up until 2023.
The ground can never fully be trusted.
Concrete offers the illusion of certainty. It is what we perceive to be permanent.
There is an unpredictability that this work holds that I also find in my work in the outdoor studio. I trust the floor to be stable, yet there's a contradiction in the work, the tension between structure and uncertainty.
