​Home - Land of Silence / Roots and reflections

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“Roots and Reflection” explores how childhood landscapes, memories, and bodily silence manifest themselves on canvas and paper.
I have often felt a resistance toward what is overly explicit and “fully explained” – I find it almost intrusive. Because I believe in something else: that art should be a space of freedom, a place where questions can be asked without necessarily finding answers.

My process is not about adding, but about taking away – about allowing the fragile immediacy to live. I spend endless amounts of time uncovering, stripping down, removing noise and ornamentation, in order to approach what feels vulnerable, honest, and personal to me. What I “create” is not a copy or an imitation, but something that springs from my innermost self, from the unconscious, where consciousness must step aside.

Sometimes I hear people say: so simple! – “a child could have made this.” And perhaps it is precisely in the unforced, the intuitive, the bare, that I believe the most valuable lies. My works are not measured by the amount of paint or the number of visible working hours. They are created out of lived experience and an inner necessity – they could not have come into being without it.

I work with lines that carry necessity, not decoration. With silence and spaces. With what lies between the words and beneath the surface.

Key words for my work:

Movement
A spring from the past – present in the now – turned toward the future
Vulnerable – powerful
Energetic – free
Emotion – participation
Existential

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The exhibition and its spaces are divided into two parts. In the first room, newer works are shown, with clear earth tones. In the next, works created over several years revolve around the same themes: identity, belonging, roots, and reflection – in a more golden palette.

Ski Art Association has its venue in Kråkstad, my own hometown. Naturally, this shapes the exhibition, which draws nourishment from my upbringing and history here. At the same time, I wish the paintings to extend beyond the personal – to be open, universal, and timeless, leaving space for multiple interpretations.

Some works are framed, others hang freely – this to create a visual tension in the room and to give the viewer space to complete the experience on their own terms.
The form of presentation emphasizes the searching, as an ongoing process.

Sande, April 25, 2025

Kari Elisabeth Haug

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Reflections on Home – The Land of Silence / Roots – Reflection
Ski Art Association, June 14–29, 2025
“Roots and Reflection” – an exploration of home, belonging, and cultural heritage

The theme of this exhibition builds on Home – The Land of Silence, shown at Palazzo Pisani-Revedin/Venice as part of a parallel exhibition to the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024.

Roots reach back in time, through landscapes and memories. Something that has always been there, something I carry within me, is brought forth.
From a childhood in Kråkstad, through the fragility of life, I search – in silence I search – driven by a longing.

The works, the stories, and the memories are interwoven and cannot be separated. In – and through – freedom I create.

Who am I? Who are you? What does it mean to belong? Where is the boundary between home and remembrance, between landscape and mind?

With childhood memories, home and roots emerge not only as something physical, but as a state of being – a deep sense of belonging that stretches through time and memory.

Home – The Land of Silence is a space for reflection, where roots and movements, tradition and change are interwoven. Roots keep us grounded, but also allow us to grow.

Home becomes not just geography, but identity – a bond between what we leave behind and what we create. My wish is that my story may touch you, open something within you, awaken wonder – and also hold universal meaning.

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The Norwegian Art Critic Kjetil Røed writes about the exhibition, read here: 

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