Earth, Wind, Fire, Water: Nordic Contemporary Crafts - A Critical Craft Anthology

The works range from embroidery and ceramics, photography and video art, to painting, sculpture and installation. Some of the artistic works presented examine the reliance of man on his surroundings. Ritta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth, for example, portray elderly people dressed in raw materials from their regions. The artista Britta Marakatt-Labba, known from documenta 14, on the other hand, raises questions of ecology, politics and history in her embroidery works and combines them with everyday motifs and mythology from her Sami culture.

Other works focus on the fragility of our terrestrial existence by using materials that change, dry out or decay over the course of the exhibition. Others again reflect holistic ecological practices in which working with a certain materiality produces close connections between the creators and their environment, a piece of land or the material itself. While references to biology, geology and cosmology in the artistic practices reflect the desire for a more profound connection to the earth, the accompanying texts by seven renowned Nordic authors penetrate deep into the material world and substantiate such concepts as material interaction and agency, posthumanism, site-specificity and symbiotic thought: How do the artists interact with the materials they have chosen? And how does one approach a material from a perspective informed by curiosity and the desire for collaboration?

This meticulously designed and highly aesthetic book is interspersed with wonderfully striking photographs. The texts – printed in the original languages in addition to English – point to the authors’ origins and become a living testament to the motif of diversity within unity, in respect of both content and aesthetic. The book is published to mark the exhibition of the same name at Galleri F15 in Moss, Norway.

Artists:
Hildur Bjarnadóttir | Ebba Bohlin | Fellesskapsprosjektet å Fortette Byen | Alma Heikkilä | Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen | Guðjón Ketilsson | Kasper Kjeldgaard | Stian Korntved Ruud | Ivana Králíková | Valentin Manz | Britta Marakatt-Labba | Pekka Paikkari | Louise Sidelmann | Brynjar Sigurðarson & Veronika Sedlmair | Ida Wieth | Hedvig Winge | Charlotta Östlund