Celestial Territory

Celestial Territory is part of the duo exhibition To Draw a Line , created in collaboration with artist Trine Bork. The exhibition explores the concepts of the fold and the line, and how forms move through time and space. Lines are understood both as separating and outlining forces, and as generators of movement—grounds for territorial performances and metamorphoses between materials, bodies, and environments. The project is inspired by John Ruskin’s reflection: “Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate, and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.” (Ruskin,1857)

The body of work in Celestial Territory is composed as a vertical borderland of hanging sensorial sculptures, forming a unified spatial image—a kind of celestial body. Plaster from the outline of the ceiling painting has been allowed to drip downward, materializing vertical linearity as traces and small sculptural formations on the floor. These gravity-driven marks extend the drawing into space, transforming line into matter and movement.

Kelp is used as both theme and material, placed in dialogue with other materialities such as yarn, clay, soil, and plaster. The works reflect on kelp’s temporality and ecological agency in relation to human-made materials. Kelp articulates the line as a living, temporal form: its elongated fronds draw continuous lines through water, shaped by currents, gravity, and light rather than fixed geometry. These lines are not boundaries but movements—connecting seabed and surface, growth and decay, attachment and drift. As kelp bends, stretches, and breaks, it inscribes time and force into space, transforming line from a static mark into an active process. The works seek to materialize and reinforce these inner lines of kelp’s materiality.

The project is further inspired by The Cosmic Garden by philosopher Emanuele Coccia, in which the atmosphere—its circulation of gases and liquids—is understood as the true center of the planet, rather than the solid earth. In a similar way, kelp exists without roots, suspended and anchored through movement rather than fixed origin.

This body of work continues an investigation into kelp initiated through site-specific, hands-on research conducted during a two-day field study of underwater kelp forests. The research involved drone observation and low-impact harvesting methods, developed in collaboration with a marine biologist as part of the Kelp Diagram Collective workshop during the Kelp Congress at the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) in September 2019.
 
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