INGRID AARSET

Hagerom / The Garden Room

8 August - 22 September 2024

In recent years, Aarset has worked with textiles in large formats, using historical references from various visual cultures as a foundation for her projects. The overarching theme of her projects involves organic patterns and ornamentation, with a focus on color, texture, and tactility. She processes the textiles in various ways, painting with reactive dyes on silk, laminating, and using different surface treatments to create textures and give the materials the desired character. The artworks are typically double-sided.

This exhibition references an underground room from antiquity with frescoes on all walls: painted trees, plants, and birds of all kinds in a forest landscape of blue-turquoise tones. It belonged to Livia Drusilla, the wife of Emperor Augustus, and is currently housed in a museum in Rome. The room is an illusion of a garden, created for enjoyment and reflection. Aarset has retained the rectangular format of the original room and aims to fill the viewer's horizon. She has abstracted the plant motifs and sought to convey an atmosphere and a more abstract illusion of a garden.

The works were developed in connection with an interdisciplinary Nordic performing arts project led by Lene Therese Teigen, who wrote a play about Livia and the women of her court. The titles refer to Livia and the location where the room was discovered and excavated in 1867. The project is supported by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage.

Ingrid Aarset (born 1958) studied at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts and Middlesex Polytechnic in London. She lives and works on Askøy, outside Bergen, and in her studio at USF. She has exhibited individually at venues such as Galleri Soft, Sogn and Fjordane Art Museum, Northern Norway Art Museum, Kunstnerforbundet, the Textile Industry Museum in Salhus, Oppland Art Center, and Hå Old Vicarage, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the country. Her works have been acquired by the National Museum in Oslo, Kode in Bergen, the Nordenfjeldske Museum of Applied Arts in Trondheim, and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has created decorations for numerous public buildings and is employed as an Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary Art at KMD/UIB.

Photos: Øystein Klakegg