Outer landscape- Solastalgia / outdoor installation
Outdoor Installations and Outdoor drawings: Solastalgia
These outdoor painting installations are created directly along the rocky shoreline of the South Coast of Norway. Composed of found driftwood and stones, they form temporary structures that sit somewhere between sculpture and expanded painting. The natural materials retain their origin yet gain new symbolic weight through color, gesture, and placement.
Each installation is arranged in response to the landscape—leaning across rocks, pointing skyward, or balancing between stones. The brightly painted surfaces form a living dialogue with the grey coastline, a rhythm of color and texture that shifts as the light changes. As I assemble them, I move into a flow state, guided by memory, intuition, and the material’s own logic. The stones may anchor a beam of driftwood, becoming an entry point or exit for the gaze—a compositional line extended from the canvas into the world.
This practice is rooted in solastalgia: the emotional tension of loving a landscape while witnessing its precarity. The installations carry both playfulness and fragility. Childhood memories of building huts on this very coast merge with a quiet urgency about belonging during the Anthropocene. The painted driftwood feels celebratory and melancholic—an echo of joy and an acknowledgment of impermanence. The structures fall and are rebuilt, again and again, as an act of persistence—a small protest of hope.
The works are never announced or marked. They are encountered by chance, discovered during a walk, and may be gone the next day. This ephemerality is central: the landscape is both canvas and collaborator. The installations dissolve the boundary between artist, artwork, and environment, forming a relational practice shaped by seasonality, light, and ongoing return.
In summer, the Nordic light becomes part of the work—expansive, luminous, and essential to the process. When winter arrives, the practice folds inward, returning to the studio and the darker forest around Oslo. This cyclical movement mirrors a shifting sense of belonging: from the coast’s openness to the forest’s intimacy. Seasonality becomes method, guiding a slow, attentive form of painting rooted in place, memory, and change
Drawing outdoors invites a slower way of being. Seasonal rhythms shape the work, and the pauses between breath, footsteps, and gestures become part of the process. These intervals create space for reflection and echo the Japanese concept of ma—the meaningful emptiness between forms. In this way, the gaps within a drawing are not voids but active presences, encouraging the viewer to attend equally to absence and form.
This attention to slowness has deep philosophical roots. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Rilke, Seneca, and Confucius all recognized the value of taking time—of letting inquiry unfold, of absorbing experience, of savoring the moment. Within creative practice, this becomes a mode of working where lingering, waiting, and noticing are as essential as making marks on the page.
Returning to the same coastal site each year, I tune myself to the shifting weather, the movement of the sea, and the subtle changes in stone and tide. This ongoing relationship stands in contrast to the accelerated pace of digital life. Dwelling with the stones becomes a sensory practice: feeling surfaces shaped by wind and water, listening to the surrounding sounds, and attending to the quiet dynamics of place.
The charcoal drawings that arise from this setting are not isolated representations but exchanges between body, stone, and environment. Each piece grows out of stillness and tactile engagement, acknowledging both the immediacy of touch and the broader ecological context. My process is intuitive and wordless, shaped by movement and perception. Much like the physical awareness of rock climbing, tracing the stones’ angles and lines becomes a kind of conversation—a dialogue between body and landscape.
