Exhibition

2021/2023

 


Installationimages from Umeå Konsthall 2023 and Röda Stens Konsthall 2021.

One day in 2021, I open an old notebook from 2014 with the note: 'I had a dream in which I was Hanna Resvoll Holmsen'. This takes me back a couple of years in time and I remember the female botanist who in the early 20th century broke norms and expectations in both her professional life and private life.

Hanna Resvoll Holmsen (Norway, 1873-1943) was often out by herself on field trips to study Arctic plants. For two summers she camped on Svalbard. She traveled there with a research ship that dropped her off on a beach, so she was there until fall came and she was picked up again. She usually took a camera with her on her travels and photographed extensively. The photograph would follow her throughout her professional career and in Norway she is considered a pioneer in early color photography. Resvoll Holmsen's photographs have been digitized through Norway's National Library. When I understand that we were on the Varanger Peninsula 110 years apart, in 1909 and 2019, I find more and more traces of our meeting. As a professional woman, as a researcher and in motherhood. This project is about time, space and beeing a women.

The works are all a mix of my own photography and Hanna Resvolls Holms photography use with permission from Oslo National Library.

The big images of flowers, is a work that encounter with Hanna Resvoll Holmsen. With an interval of 110 years, her photographs from Berlevåg and my dried flowers from the same place 2019 have met and become a new image, made in 2021.  

The work "The Archive" is inspired by Hanna Resvoll Holmsen's photographic archive, which is preserved at the National Library in Oslo. In eight archive boxes, photographs from a field trip on the Varanger Peninsula in 2019 have been sorted. Here, all the pictures that I took with my digital system camera should be printed and preserved for the future, they are sorted by place and consist of motifs of both nature and the city as personal pictures of my family.