texts

Paradox of practice

There is an ongoing dialogue between my artistic practice and my work in agriculture. In both fields, care is inseparable from decay. Growth, maintenance, and depletion unfold in parallel. Oxidation, biodeterioration, erosion, and percolation are processes within which the work exists. In contrast to heritage practices that seek to stabilize and preserve, these processes insist on time, entropy, and transformation.

At present, I am returning to photography. Its capacity to hold contradictions and its resistance to immediacy create space for work without performative gestures.. I think meaning happen through relations and context and that when a works circulate between different frameworks, a field, an archive, publications, digital platforms, or gallery spaces, each situation shapes how they are read.

Paradox of practice

There is an ongoing dialogue between my artistic practice and my work in agriculture. In both fields, care is inseparable from decay. Growth, maintenance, and depletion unfold in parallel. Oxidation, biodeterioration, erosion, and percolation are processes within which the work exists. In contrast to heritage practices that seek to stabilize and preserve, these processes insist on time, entropy, and transformation.

At present, I am returning to photography. Its capacity to hold contradictions and its resistance to immediacy create space for work without performative gestures.. I think meaning happen through relations and context and that when a works circulate between different frameworks, a field, an archive, publications, digital platforms, or gallery spaces, each situation shapes how they are read.

Outdoor studio

2023-2025

I was unclear what to expect when entering the site I was given in January 2024. The Outdoor Studio began as a response to the limitations of the indoor studio. It first appeared as something outside its comfort zone, a place initially defined by an imagined desire. For most of the year, the site has stood unnoticed, indifferent, occasionally activated by a group course, occasionally framed as if I were fulfilling its intended function. What was left behind was a few rotten wood logs, two wires, a weathered tarpaulin, some paint and the scaffolding (now referred to as the drying rack). A stump. A broom.

Most of the time, I swept the floor, watched textiles become soaked, and dug them up from under the snow. I collected water in buckets that I later used to wash the floor with when it was at its warmest to prevent cracks from forming. I observe mosquito larvae swimming inside the buckets and leave them be. I removed dirt from the ground and remnants from previous use. I worked with what was there, with all that the room could carry. I started tracking my activity on the walls with a marker. Movement. Placement.

Method and practice in the field

Over the past two years at the academy, I have worked in the outdoor studio: four walls, an open-air roof, and a wooden floor. Slowly twisting away from its original form, as a reminder of its erosion.

What I learned from the site was that the work could also disappear, which means I had to rethink what it would mean to end a work in its process. The work existed only as long as I tended to it, and in the moment I stopped, it began to change. Letting go became part of the method, allowing things to fall apart and accept that the work might end without conclusion. The process has grown into a way of working, where observation and care define the pace, and where making becomes a form of maintenance. It is not about control but about my inevitable need for it, even when I realize that this pursuit often leads to failure.

Many works originate from this practice, including Perfect State and several textile experiments. My recent work is an extension of this method. Read more about those here

here

here

and here.

Perfect State

2025

“Perfect State” (a term used to describe an object’s ideal condition) materialized from the tension between permanence and change. It consists of eight concrete casts made one by one on the floor in the outdoor studio. The work represents something I can move and take with me, yet it is self-contradictory in its materiality between stability and displacement. It is connected to the outdoor studio in form but stands as its own object when moved. Each cast varies in surface and dimension but serves the same purpose. This makes them adaptable and can be repositioned or reinterpreted in future projects. Miwon Kwon writes about this tension in ”One place after another” how works must negotiate between being rooted and being mobile. When art is moved, its meaning shifts. It becomes not just an object, but part of a larger narrative shaped by its new context. “Perfect State” exists in this in-between. It’s a neither/nor object. It can be displaced, absorbed, or redefined depending on where and how it’s used. This ambiguity is what interests me. This asymmetry. I rely on the outdoor studio for purpose, shelter, and structure. But the room continues to exist independently of my presence.

I find the ability to reuse and change the casts compelling. At Kunsthall, I wanted to bring the space I´ve been working in with me. Already upon entering the Kunsthall, the presence of the textiles was felt as their scent greeted you before the works themselves did. The casts bear the imprint of the studio floor, resting beside “twenty-nine folded textiles,” folded together with first aid kits subtly pointing toward future possibilities and the need for safety in the act of making (underscores the importance of having a secure place to work). I’m showing a piece that evokes a sense of mobility.

The casts protect. The textiles hold. A desolate landscape makes room for a dream playground.

See work

PERFECT STATE (2025)

Eight casts (120cm x 80cm)

Concrete (B20), Iron, Tar

TEWNTY-NINE FOLDED TEXTILES (2023-25)

Various dimensions

re-worked textiles with cod liver oil and tar, two-year process in the outdoor studio. First aid kits.

Perfect State, as a hypothesis?

Perfect State developed into a hypothesis after my work in the outdoor studio had to be cleared. This was the day I was looking forward to because this would mean I had to decide what to keep and what to let go of. Over the summer, I had left the casts within a structure, and by the time I returned, spiders and insects had settled into the cracks and holes. Some of the corners (which hadn’t been properly sealed within their metal armatures) had cracked. I noticed that the structural failure in the casts, combined with their back-and-forth transportation, had left most of them in an imperfect state. The original idea was for them to stay in a way that I wanted them to, but each attempt to preserve the surface felt like an act of control and a way to hold on to something that was changing.

The repetition of copying a wooden floor in concrete, working through weather changes, and ending up with eight heavy casts made me aware of my own impuls toward control.

After a day of clearing out materials, such as dust and sand remnants from the casts, some buckets, and soaked textiles, I noticed how much the work in the outdoor studio had changed the way I approached my practice. The hypothesis took the form of a question: What does it mean for something to exist in a “perfect” state? Who defines that state, what must be excluded for it to appear, and can such a condition be engaged with, rather than upheld? Ultimately, I began to consider what it means to work within—or against—the logic of perfection.

OUTSIDE OF HABITAT

Hamphallen, Fjøsangerveien 2024

In Autumn 2024, I brought my work from the outdoor studio to Hamphallen in Fjøsangerveien, an abandoned space consisting of a 320-meter-long ropewalk as well as an additional building alongside the ropewalk, called Hamphallen. Within each room, the air moves freely. Primarily because of the lack of doors and broken windows. After a day I brought the works back to the outdoor studio, leaving them untouched until winter.

Hamphallen raises the question: how do we engage with such spaces artistically? I enter the space with certain expectations, perhaps even a set of associations. I wanted my work to be affected by this place. But is it I who gives meaning to the room, or does the abandoned space impart meaning to me? Are the works merely objects on a frame, or do they become part of the space? And after leaving it for interpretation and documentation, what do they say?

 “It reveals, I suggest, something about complicity”

See work

Image 1-2: Textile with cod liver oil and silkscreen. Mounted on self-made oak fram with tar.

Image 3-8: re-worked silkscreened textiles, cod liver oil, tar, tissue paper.

Image 9-10: Photograph from previous exhibition (2021) mounted in selfmade oakframe, reworked with tar on glass.

ALL THAT I COULD CARRY

Video 8 minutes

I didn't expect the outcome to be what it was. I had talked about allowing the room to exist without imposing my own ideas of what should or shouldn’t be there. Yet, my proposal for the upcoming exhibition at Kunsthallen turned into something quite literal: a cast of the floor.

Made of insistent material, it is only controlled by the ratio of water to crushed stone. In its softest state, it ultimately revealed its most dramatic form. One after one slab was made, the one heavier than the other. If they had been any larger or heavier, I wouldn’t have been able to move or carry them. I only realized this afterward, which was fortunate because I was by myself most of the time. They became all that I could carry, all that I could control. After university, this would be my place, something I could take with me. In a state when it got relevant.

Perfect State was first shown at Bergen Kunsthall in 2025. An opportunity to present my practice within a different setting.

read more: What humans leave behind in a state when it got irrelevant.