Learning to compose will need many names, not a global one, the voices of many peoples, knowledges, and earthly practices. —Isabelle Stengers1
Being outdoors, learning from nature—and humans who live and work with her—and sharing knowledge. Creating art for a better home for all life on Earth. These are places and practices I enjoy. My artistic practice builds on Braiding Sweetgrass, The Mushroom at the End of the World, The Enchanted Life, Is a River Alive. Books combining storytelling through both traditional and scientific knowledge. They contain a wealth of scientific papers, books, and traditional knowledge-holders from whom I can learn.
Natalie Field introduced me to Creature Conserve’s mentorship programme. It focusses on interdisciplinary communication between native communities, artists, and researchers. Attending online workshops in summer 2025 convinced me to apply with this proposal:
Walk (through) the Woods
Learning about beings who call woods in Trondheim, Norway home
1) Dual language pop-up book
2) Scale up to gallery exhibit (outdoors?)
3) Adapt to theatrical presentation (something completely new for me)
My first draft page includes English, Norwegian, and Southern Sámi names for different forest beings. The Sámi names come from the online dictionary Nedtedigibaakoeh, discussed at a seminar I attended in February 2025: Seminar on Sámi research and teaching at NTNU (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet | Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
This draft page flips open several times to reveal beings who live in forests near fjords. I ripped paper and painted with watercolour, which is also how I created a potential book cover last year. Click on the below images to enlarge them.
UPDATE JANUARY 2025
Life as a Tree: Forest as community
My proposed artwork doesn’t want to be a book. I’ve tried and coaxed but it wants to be something bigger. So my pop-up book becomes a walk-through diorama. It (still) incorporates Norwegian and English text with watercolour and ink illustrations. It pulls in theatrical elements from my original proposal. It incorporates what I’m loving—creating 3D trees from my Century Project2 and getting outdoors for quiet reflection.
A walk-through diorama builds up to—and better suits—the gallery space where I’ll exhibit in a final group show with my Master of Fine Art cohort in May 2026. The gallery space is a warehouse building with high ceilings and a big garage door (which will likely stay open), so it’s not exactly your typical gallery.
Here’s the big picture: I’m focussing on Norwegian forest as a community. The protagonist is a spruce tree, and the supporting characters are beings who share space with the spruce. I’ve painted simple Norwegian forest landscapes and skyscapes on second-hand curtains to hang from the ceiling in the warehouse space3.
I plan to use large tree branches to represent spruce and deciduous trees in the ecosystem. I’ve done this in previous exhibitions and would like to push it farther.4 Comic-style watercolour illustrations of forest species will adorn the trees and be presented in zines with information about the species.
I’m creating a zine to help people reflect on beings they discover in the forest around them. Another workshop idea: making 3D cardboard trees. The aim is for workshop attendees to learn about beings in the photo of their cardboard tree they share with me.5 of their own cardboard tree. I invite a curious audience to think about (disappearing) beings—who we rarely see—and how we humans can positively engage in their flourishing.
I’ll present these projects in a group exhibition 20-22 March at my university gallery with fellow Master’s students from my art academy in Trondheim, Norway. I’ll engage audiences with outdoor workshops—forest wanders—in urban forest, both before and during the March exhibition and my final Master’s exhibition (likely in late May).
1from Isabelle Stenger’s book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism
2View photos of the 100 cardboard trees I drew or cut out for my artwork in the KUNO Biennial, which were my 100 iterations for the Creature Conserve Century Project. I also took several hundred photos of my cardboard trees outside in the real world with live trees, and this project is ongoing.
3Inspired by Cauleen Smith’s banners from the exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Norway in summer 2024
4Scroll down a bit to find the section on (c)artographic
5I see people tagging the project on Instagram, an account such as LifeAsATreeCommunity. Are hashtags still a thing? I’m old. Still working on this.
outspokenimages.com 