“With all our self-consciousness, we have very little sense of where we live, where we are right here right now.” – Ursula K. Le Guin¹

With American sci-fi and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin in the back of my mind, I see an inevitable change to our sense of belonging, of home. It seems everything is up in the air nowadays and nothing feels certain. Having a home is more than simply having a roof over our heads. It is about belonging and grounding. Spanning cultures, generations, and nationalities, we share an innate desire to connect — with others and with nature. Engaging with nature is more than aesthetic pleasure — it connects us to something enduring and universal. It is a reminder that home is not only a physical space but also an experience, one that can be found in the quiet rhythms of the natural world.

As a Danish curator, I resonate with the concept of the changing seasons and the transformations they bring. Throughout my travels in Norway in the past few years, I have met artisans whose practices are inseparable from the landscape they inhabit and the climate they are in. In our conversations, it became clear that they see nature as a teacher, a companion, and a mirror, and how the rhythms of the seasons are a part of the work they produce. Nature, for many of them, is not scenery or resource, but a home: a place, where making and being are intertwined.

The vulnerability of nature
This is the case for textile artist Hanne Friis, who I met at her studio by Frysja, close to Akerselva in Oslo, Norway, in 2023. The vulnerability of nature is the essence of her artistic practice, and her large hand-stitched textile sculptures are abstract forms in seemingly constant movement.

‘Nature reminds us of our own mortality; it is brutal, wild, and constantly changing. I think of my works as imitating life forms, but also immaterial and abstract processes, thoughts, and emotions. Perhaps that is how nature affects us: we recognise ourselves in nature as nature, while at the same time it opens up existential questions.’

In some of her works, Hanne Friis adds a different dimension by plant dyeing the fabric, thus using nature directly by gathering selected plants in specific places. The method is time-consuming and physical, and the entire process becomes part of the work, she says, adding that she is ‘particularly interested in using natural materials from trees that are rich in tannins, in combination with iron water’.

‘From the trees, I use cones, nuts, bark, and leaves, which give golden brown shades, while the iron water dyes the textile gray.’

Mountain high
This sort of abstraction is also present in the works of another Oslo-based artist, Monica Flakk, whose photographs I have seen and tried to unravel and understand for years. Is the subject a mountain, is it stone, is it real?

Growing up by the small valley of Norangsdalen, she was surrounded by mountains blocking the sun for five months of the year — nature was ever-present and the mountain formations, she says, became part of her identity. Like Friis, her work is never classical figurative, but a nod to nature’s intrinsic value and vulnerability.

She gathers stones. ‘They are a focal point of my artistic practice, with geological time and phenomena as themes, often in the shadow of dark ecology. The stones picked up from the ground have a richness of detail on their surface; they tell of their inherent history and geological cycle. Like silent witnesses,’ she says.

A casting compound consisting of cement, pigment, and a curated selection of stones, an archive of nature, are transformed into forms which are both sculptures in themselves and the subject of her photographic works. They are inspired by Japanese Suiseki stones, shaped by water and raised up as miniature landscapes and self-portraits from nature, dating back to 1288.

After becoming a mother, she now travels to her childhood home, a farm, to create sculptures. Opening up the process to include her four-year-old in the gathering of materials — mainly stones found in the river that winds through the village — has made it a more personal and intimate one. By now, her son draws the contours of the mountains in chalk on the asphalt and is learning the names of all the peaks that frame the village.

Inter-dependency
A Danish ceramic artist whom I have collaborated with for several years is Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen. Like Flakk, her sons are also part of her process in various ways. In her exhibition It cannot be your favourite butterfly if it is not there anymore, Pontoppidan paid homage to the oeuvre of the late Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984), using the South African term ubuntu (“I am because we are”). We can create because of the presence of each other, we are dependent on each other.

Pernille Pontoppidan’s work is deeply engaged with Ursula K. Le Guin’s writings and theories, which informed her 2022 exhibition at KH7 artspace in Aarhus, Denmark, At Væve Portaler (Weaving Portals). She lives with her family, dogs, and sheep on a farm in the forest of Jutland, with easy access to her large ceramic studio just across the yard, surrounded by the ever-present life of the natural world: ‘In my daily life, I am surrounded by forest. Lush green forest, full of life from creatures whose names I do not know. What I like here is that I am outnumbered. I am powerless — or perhaps more accurately, as the word implies, my power is insignificant; it is empty. I like it that way,’ she says, and when asked how this loss of power is reflected in her ceramic practice, she notes that, ‘In my work, I also reflect on this power dynamic. I consider that in the interaction between the material and myself there is an exchange. I press, it shifts. In the same way, I believe the forest can be experienced: when I bend a branch aside to pass, I am aware that I am merely a visitor. The forest is a special place. Constantly changing. Intelligent and completely superior to us.’

Just as I couldn’t imagine her living in a more tranquil space, she announces that she bought a house on the picturesque peninsula of Helgenæs in the eastern part of Jutland. This summer, she has been working from a small studio there, in the hilly landscape with its lush flora, wildlife, and the sea on every side. Even though her ceramic sculptures never resemble anything visually inspired by her surroundings, these surroundings do have a strong influence on the outcome:

‘I am aware that I am affected by my environment, and that it sets a precedent for a feeling — whether pleasant, good, sharp, soft, unfortunate, or coherent. I work with these feelings, and through them I investigate how to translate experience into a sculptural language of form.’

Roots in the north
The varied landscape of Helgenæs, shaped by glacial formations, is one of the most spectacular views in Denmark, I think. And still, it is a whisper compared to the scenery that awaits when I arrive in the far north of Norway in late August 2024. Waiting for the autumn to set in, for the winter to make an appearance and the long-awaited spring that turns to summer, it seems everything is about to change. In Tromsø, the colours from the brightness of the gleaming midnight sun evolve to beginning oranges and reds. Autumn is a season of ambivalence. In Danish, the word autumn is efterår, and has a tone of time slipping away, of decline, of endings, whereas the Norwegian høst means harvest, the storing of abundance before winter. Between these two words lies a space full of tension and possibility. Autumn is both ending and harvest, loss and plenty, decay and ripening.

Growing up with a dam between my childhood home, situated in the West Jutland region of Denmark, and the North Sea, I understand the importance of the seasons. Of honouring them, seeking to understand them and how dependent we are on nature. Yet, travelling in the northernmost part of Norway — from Tromsø to Alta, staying in Karasjok and Kautokeino, making my way through Abisko in Sweden to Lofoten, Myre, and Senja and back to Tromsø — it became clear just how important the changing of the seasons is. And how they make us feel at home. It reminded me of a quote from 1939 by the late Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen, who wrote: ‘What remains in the memory of a motoring trip in Norway, from a thousand impressions and details, is a great collective vision of Norwegian mountain nature, so totally different from the lowland one comes from, dimensions up and down, a journey in the zones, from the belt of deciduous forest and up into the eternal snow, and down again, all seasons, at times experienced several times in one day.'²

Nature finds its way
Driving north from Henningsvær on one of my last days of travelling in the north, textile artist Ingrid Larssen welcomed me to her home in Dverberg on the east coast of the island of Andøya. She is back home, and has been for quite some years now. She left for Oslo at the age of 18 to study metalwork at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry, but longed for the tranquility she experienced in the north and moved back eight years later:

‘I had to return, because what could give me inspiration and the calm to create is this place: the sea that has scoured and shaped the landscape, mountains that draw both soft and hard horizons, shifting weather that provides an endless palette of colours for inspiration. The thrill of lying on a quay or paddling a kayak and peering down into the sea: what is happening on the seabed? The clear, pure sea that both gives and takes.’

The unpredictable, harsh weather already shows itself, though autumn has only just set in.

‘There is something compelling about raw and brutal nature that in seconds shifts to infinite beauty,’ she says. ‘To be within that wonder, in the timeless and weightless. Alone in the vast landscape. It is liberating.’ Larssen feels at home here, and in her work, nature finds its way in — both directly and indirectly. Whether it be collecting kelp stems that have been washed ashore, dried by the sun and cracked by the frost of winter, or it be hand-stitching smocking onto plant-dyed silk, dyed with seaweed or sea urchins and inspired by sea anemones, sea urchins, and other marine creatures. For another distinctive work, Room for All from 2014, commissioned by the new Vesterålen Hospital in Stokmarknes, Norway, she created a work consisting of no fewer than 1416 sea urchins, which she cleaned in her kitchen. Now they rest safe and warm in woollen pockets to symbolise the patients of the hospital as being both individuals and as well as part of a community, an entity. On the living room windowsill sits the largest, most pristine sea urchin I have ever seen. It has no chips or cracks, it is just perfect. Like a treasure found by someone who really knows her surroundings; I am sure Larssen is as proud of her find as I am impressed.

Immersed in stillness
‘Nature leaves you with your thoughts, for better or worse, and it is from that space that new work emerges. In this way, it functions as both collaborator and context, framing the process and influencing the outcomes even when it is not directly represented.’

The words are Mimi Jung’s, a Korean artist, who has called a house and nearly ten acres in rural Montana in the United States her home, for the past almost five years. In the presence of deer, elk, moose, and wild bunnies, ‘Daily life here,’ she says, ‘is immersed in stillness.’ At first it left her feeling exposed, but over time it became liberating, both for her work and herself, she continues, speaking of the silence, and the clarity and calm the daily walks on the property provide.

‘For me, being in nature now feels like a daily necessity. The openness of the landscape and the vast Montana sky set the tone for each day. The colour combinations I notice in my environment often find their way into my work. More recently, my surroundings have pushed me to expand beyond the studio. I am developing outdoor sculptures, something I don’t think I would have pursued without being propelled by the place I live.’ She would probably never have thought of expanding her work, mainly centreing on natural fibres such as cotton, wool, silk, and mohair, to outdoor sculpture had it not been for her living with a 360-degree view of the mountains. The mountains, it feels like something she shares with all the Norwegian artists I have met: a reminder of one’s own smallness among the mountains stretching skywards, the ancient trees and jagged cliffs.

Grounded in nature
Whereas nature in the works of Hanne Friis, Monica Flakk, Pernille Pontoppidan, Ingrid Larssen, and Mimi Jung appears more as an essence, a means, and an abstraction, it is rendered directly in several of the Danish glass artist Lene Bødker’s works. When co-curating her exhibition Stories to be Told³ at the art museum GLAS in Ebeltoft, Jutland, I gained insight into her process, and noticed how essential it is for her body and psyche to be spiritually connected to nature. Since childhood, she has felt most at home in nature and feels like she is in an ongoing conversation with her surroundings and her material. It shows in her titles such as Flame, Listen to Mother Earth, The Wind, Waves and The Forest; in the exact mirroring of the rugged bark of a pine tree, the quiet geometry of pinecones, or the golden heads of wheat from the farmer’s field in her series of reliefs. Like Pontoppidan, her hands are in the material, but whereas Pontoppidan’s approach is intuitive and spontaneous, Bødker’s work follows a more deliberate path, a precise imprint through the lost-wax process. Glass, she observes, contains a depth and a transience, substance and fragility, strength, resistance, lightness, gravity, and transparency — qualities that draw her in. Nature, perhaps, exerts the very same spell.

‘Nature offers and contains many different frequencies, which I try to absorb and attune myself to. My task is to bring presence and openness, and to carry some of the sensations I perceive in nature into the spaces where my creative and craft-based processes unfold.’

Nature is a force that moves in and out with these six artists, and is an initiator of a constant, lifelong, dialogue. These artists share a sensibility in their portrayal of the outdoors — whether it be with objects or colours collected outside or through visual interpretations or echoes of, or feelings for, nature. Their practices honour the natural elements in various ways, engaging with it rather than exploiting it, being present, mindful and with utmost respect. In nature, there are no straight lines. The shapes are organic, there are traces of life and imprints of time passed. We move with the seasons; in the dark autumn and winter months, we cosy up inside and as soon as the sunlight returns, we are outside. This constant cycle of change is deeply embedded in our way of life. We are fortunate that artists share their visions and insights with us, helping us appreciate these seasonal shifts more deeply. And find our way.