Out and about in January

I had my winter vacation the first week of January, before the start of this spring’s projects, and my free time coinceded with sun and lots of snow. I had a digustingly wonderful week building snow caves, going tobogganing, watching the illusive northern nights from my window – and eating homemade celestial shortbread.

Five projects are now in the pipeline, all with different finishing dates so that no deadlines collide. One of the projects I’m in the process of finishing up now, and will be sent to print the upcoming week.

1) Fløyen: The first project is illustrations for the Nature School house at Fløyen. This project has been in development this autumn, and I just received green light from the project manager and activity leader Ingvild Jarnæs that we’re good to go.

For the nature school I’m decorating the outside of a wooden house with life size illustrations that greets visitors with with anecdotes about the role insects play in our lives – and a prompt to start talking about foraging.

The figures will be printed on aluminium coated with white surface and mounted on the house. I have some minor tweaks I’m dabbling with this weekend because I wanted the scans to be of higher quality, and when that’s done it’s off to print. And then you’re all invited to a forest vernissage to greet the illustrations in place.

2) Cider labels: Together with “Hardangerbonden“, Ingrid Sekse, I’m designing and illustrating labels for two ciders and two apple sodas. She runs her family’s farm in Sekse in Hardanger, and are producing some lovely crisp ciders that she and her husband brought for our first meetup in my studio at Bryggen.

We’re well underway in the sketching process, and happily they enjoyed my apple butt sketch for their non alcoholic cider “Nude”.

I’ve been following them on social media after I came by their reenactment of “Three wishes for Cinderella”; and if videos of snowboarding apple farmers in picturesque hillsides in a fjord is your thing, you should definitely visit her Instagram account. The other labels have trolls riding wheelbarrows and a dancing farmer. Good times.

3) KODE Composer Homes: My project with KODE is to develop an illustrated book about the composer Agathe Backer Grøndahl. She is not as well known as her male contemporaries even though she was considered among the best composers of her time. The museum wants to rectify her status, and as part of the exhibition “Harriet Backer. Every Atom is Colour” (Harriet Backer being Grøndahl’s sister) KODE is producing a sound book with snippets of her compositions. Together with museum consultant Maike Aarebrot Flick, who had the idea for the book, I’m now devouring everything I can read about her. As part of the research process I’m also visiting the different composer homes and talking to the curators at the museums to narrow down a style for the book and illustrations.

But the absolutely most delightful part of this project is that our meetings also consist of listening to her compositions.

We are meeting Wednesdays to listen to music and work on the book, so in the spirit of “Mean Girls”: “On Wednesdays we channel our inner Victorian and listen to Classical Music“.

4) UiB/Kystmuseet: Before Christmas I met up with marine biologist Katrine Kongshavn and museum consultant Marianne Lindgren at Kystmuseet. They had a great idea for a board game for use at the museum, and the brief was so well worked out both in content and game mechanics, that I could start the visual work without a longer research period. There is always research to do (which I enjoy) but if it’s a theme that is not my expertise (in this case educating about marine life) the research rabbit hole can sometimes eat up a bulk of time that could be spent doing the creative work. So having more brains at it is splendid.

One of the things guiding my sketches is accessability. The gameplay is based on snakes and ladders expanded with cards, and the board will be printed quite large and have a lot of visual info. I’m working with it both being physically accessible and readable from several sides around a table, managing an accessible rulebook, and keeping the gaming time within a reasonable limit. I enjoy a bit of game design and working with ocean themed tasks, so this is a happy marriage.

5) Music score: This is the more arty of this spring’s projects. In collaboration with noise artist John Hegre I’m designing and illustrating two musical scores for sound installations: “The ill tempered intonarumori” and “Six cycles to Gong Gregor”. I’m pleased to work with visualising soundscapes again (not exactly like Monster Jazz but similar). The freedom I have here can be both inspiring and intimidating – unlearning what a score looks like when there are no notes is giving me a headache. But also fun. The printed format is the only straightforward part, an A4 booklet, but the rest is (quite literally) a blank page.

On the side I’ve been writing on my own book project “RUNA”, but this January I had to prioritize, so I couldn’t spend as much time on it as I dreamed of. But I’m soon finishing editing the first draft and will post a peek into the first chapter.

Since the startup of this many projects is quite intense I’m looking forward to some good long hours immersing myself in the process. That means less days in my gallery shop and more closed up in my studio – but my minions Wiktoria, Ingrid and Helene will be there to greet you as usual Monday to Saturday 11:00 to 17:00.

Now I’m making myself a cup of tea and a sandwich and will set up next week’s framework for an immersive sketching spree.