Barbro Raen Thomassen

Gunnar Danbolt: FROM SEED TO OBJECT
Per-Helge Haugen: THE AMBIGUOUS OBJECT
Øystein Laundal: SCRIPT AND IMAGES - A DOUBLE HERITAGE
Ingrid Juell Moe: WHAT IS A PLACE?
Wera Sæther:THAT WHIICH NO LONGER IS. AND THE SORROW
Barbro Raen Thomassen: ASHES AND WHITE
Barbro Raen Thomassen: INSTALLATION FOR THREE WALLS
Barbro Raen Thomassen: ARTIST`S STATEMENTS
Barbro Raen Thomassen: TRIBUTE FROM LILY AND BIRCH

Barbro Raen Thomassen: TORSTEIN – HIS CHILD

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Barbro Raen Thomassen - Artist´s Statements

SEARCHING FOR THAT WHICH DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY LET ITSELF BE FOUND
The medium could be sculpture, installation, land art, drawing, photo, multimedia. It could be paper, concrete, wood, earth, stone,
grass, ash, dust, light. Or something else.
The works emerge autonomous, looking for somewhere to be. Or the place may be given: an exhibition hall, an outside yard,
a barley field, a bunker. The place invites cooperation, occupation, investigation. The work comes into existence in an understanding
with the place. Under all circumstances: an exercise in concentration, keeping a fixed glance, tuning the ear, searching for that which
does not immediately let itself be found, waiting till it happens.
My attention is drawn to the overlooked, the rejected, the almost invisible, almost negligible. Is this where the significant and beautiful
is to be found? “Beauty and the humiliated”, Albert Camu´s word pair: He “wished to be true to them both.” What value has a seed of weed?
What value has a disabled child lacking in mobility and language? “Art is a wound that turns into light,” said Georges Braque.
It is a miracle whenever it happens.

TO DWELL INSIDE THE QUESTIONS AND SEE IF SOMETHING HAPPENS
“What do you want with your art?” The observer´s question to the artist.
The artist has completed her work. For maybe two years she has prepared her exhibition. She has not written, she has not sung,
she has not acted. She has used no words. Because words could not adequately say what needed to be said. It had to be images,
objects, or something quite different. Yet she has done her work, shown it, handed it over. And then she has withdrawn.
Now it is left to the eye of the beholder. It is no longer a question of what the artist intends, but of what the observer wants.
The observer may wonder: What do I seek in encounter with this art? What does the work of art want with me? Will I have to put
aside what I do not understand in favour of something I may learn? Will I need to put aside what I do understand
for the sake of something I may learn?
The artist has spent two years on her work of art. Could the observer give it two minutes? Two quarters of an hour? Two hours?
Two days? Without demanding an answer from the artist? But rather turning the questions towards himself? Our own questions
probably shape us more than the answers. Within the questions lie possibilities, movement, openings.
Hold on to the questions. Penetrate them. Dwell inside them. And see if something happens.

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Catalogue text for the installation “As a feather through cosmos – like a stone”, Inselgalerie, Berlin 2005. Seed objects and a circular
object in limestone. Text by Paal-Helge Haugen on stone tablet.

FROM SEED TO OBJECT

Silence – living in the grass
underneath each straw
and in the blue space
between the stones
Rolf Jacobsen

A seed is – as expressed in this art project, “lighter than air, stronger than death”, but the seeds we see in this exhibition are both
large and heavy, not likely to be carried away by any wind. This is a paradox, and a significant paradox, because it tells us something
about the nature of art itself. If a seed as light as air is to be given permanence as a work of art, it must be incarnated in a physical
body, in this case in heavy white limestone.

The great American poet Wallace Stevens spoke of “ideas, but in things”. And that is precisely what this is all about.
Barbro Raen Thomassen’s installation is an example of an idea-based art form where what we see - a square base with a number
of different seed-objects, a circular object and a stone tablet – points beyond itself towards something else that cannot be seen.
This distinguishes this art form from modernist works where the meaning was more or less given in the texture – in its very surface,
open to the senses (aesthetic). That is not the case here, although the surfaces themselves clearly deserve to be looked at.
Raen Thomassen’s seed-objects are more closely related to medieval pictures and sculptures that always referred to something

other than themselves.

This is one of the reasons why the post-modern period of the last thirty years has seen a much greater interest in the Middle Ages
than previously. In the modernist period it was important to cultivate the art forms – in sculpture it was the purely sculptural qualities
that were to be emphasised. Above all one had to avoid literariness, so central to nineteenth century art. For literature was literature
and had nothing to do with sculpture. John Cage and his circle started to tear down these high barriers between art forms
in the 1950s - visual art and theatre were fused in performance and happenings, while Cage read poems in a way that turned them
into music.Raen Thomassen’s installation is an example of this, though here it is the barriers between poetry and visual art that
are transcended.

For as we try to connect the words of a poem to arrive at a meaning, so will we, when faced with this installation, try to make
connections and find meaning in a series of heavy stones, formed as seeds, that more or less by chance have landed close to one
another in a large square in the centre of a gallery.By chance? Is it not a characteristic of our relation to art that we tacitly assume
that it conveys some kind of meaning? The question is which? One possibility is to regard the installation as a kind of artefact-poem,
an interpretation backed up by the tablet of stone. Seeds are small, often very small (Matthew 13, 31-32), and not many people
have been given the chance to study their forms as we now can.

Yet they are, in the right conditions, capable of being transformed into something quite different, such as “a great tree where the
birds of heaven come to nest”. It is this change or metamorphosis that can come about if we are willing to sacrifice what we have got,
in this case, lovely and alluring seed-objects, for something we cannot and will not know anything about – at some point in the future.
Such are the existential problems laid before us by Raen Thomassen, problems dealing with our lives in a limited and unforeseeable
dimension of time, and with the faith and courage demanded of us if we are to risk an unknown transformation, with a justifiable
doubt holding us back. And yet this is only one interpretation of many – the installation challenges us to find more.
And that is what makes it so fruitful.

Professor Gunnar Danbolt
Art Historian

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Catalogue texts for the installations “Lighter than air - stronger than death”, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall,
Arendal 2003 and “As a feather through cosmos – like a stone”, Inselgalerie, Berlin 2005. Seed objects in limestone.
Texts by Paal-Helge Haugen on stone tablets.

THE AMBIGUOUS OBJECT

Herbalists in ancient and medieval times thought that a seed was a visual essence of what was to unfold in the growing plant.
At the same time the seed was a mystery, as expressed in the parable of the mustard seed: The smallest of all seeds that grew
to a tree where all the birds of heaven nested. We too can experience the paradox of the seed: It is in rest, a still point between
two dynamic processes, between decay and growth. It is taken out of time, because the indefinite present of the seed is
materialised in the fusion of past and future.

There are seeds that lie dormant for centuries, millennia, in the desert, in tombs, in sarcophagi, before they are unearthed and sprout.
A seed is pure latency, charged stasis. In itself unchangeable, it speaks of change. Carved in stone it becomes the image of an image,
a sign as close to language as to the organic world. Light becomes heavy, small becomes large, the inorganic organic.
In this paradoxical form the stone object faces two ways: towards the uncertainty of language and towards the certainty of growth and decay.
Carved in stone the linguistic signs simulate a certainty that cannot exist.

While language can turn away from what it sees, the outside of the seed indicates an inside that only exists as something other,
expressed through the transcendence of metamorphosis. Together seed and sign, semen and semeion, take part in a dissemination,
an out-sowing, where meaning can never be harvested as other than potential meaning, like the seed-corn that is neither life nor death,
but an object or a state cancelling opposites, transforming them into possibility and hope.

Paal-Helge Haugen

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Catalogue text for “Earth to Earth”, Genius Loci 2000, land art at Søgne Gamle Prestegård. 250 cubic metres of earth shaped
as a circle with an 18 metre diameter, sown with grass.

WHAT IS A PLACE?

The seen and the unseen: Can one speak of the outer and inner story of a place, the spirit of a place? Genius loci was in Roman
times the term for the guardian deity of a place; in our day the Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schultz has reinvigorated the term.

Genius loci is the name of an art project based on an understanding of place. It started in 1999 with a seminar and an exhibition
of two centuries of coastal landscape painting. The following year 2000, as the first part of the Land Art exhibition, six artists worked
in the area round the church and rectory of Søgne Gamle Prestegård, through their work opening up a new understanding of the place.
The project will end in 2002 with the work of another six artists on the islands of Ny-Hellesund.

The renowned Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn’s contribution was the drawing for the new multi-faith chapel on Kapelløya i Ny-Hellesund,
literally open to the four corners of the earth. As the site for her earth sculpture in the Land Art exhibition of the millenium year,
Barbro Raen Thomassen chose Kirkeneset, close to the the church. In the seminar the archeologist Frans Arne Stylegar reminded
us of the significance of this place with its large imposing burial mounds in pre-christian times. Later one of the first churches
in the region was built on that very spot. The river has provided fertile soil throughout the ages, and it was in this connection
Barbro Raen Thomassen as an 11-year old first became acquainted with the place, on all fours weeding among the vegetables.
And here she worked through the spring of 2000 to create her earth sculpture.
In the words of the writer Gro Dahle: "A place has many places". "Earth to Earth" has given Kirkeneset a new place.

It has given us new insight into the site, it has opened up our imaginative understanding of the history of the place, and it has released
a host of new questions. It is a strange and wonderful sculpture, calm and colossal. The grassy earthwork mound has changed with the seasons,
marked by sun, wind and rain. Many people have enjoyed passing by at different times, seeing it lying there huge and extraordinary
in the middle of the field. The sculpture is unobtrusively present as living "landscape art" outside the confines of the gallery, generously accessible.
Thus it becomes part of the British Land Art tradition that is characterized by the way it works with, not against, the forces of nature.

We can move mountains. Today we have machines and technology that can do almost anything. But do we use our gift of awareness?
Are we present in the present? As if it were some flying object from the future, or maybe from the past, I feel that this earthen mound
has something to tell me. It moves me to reflection and sensations I was unaware of before it landed here at Kirkeneset and inside me.

Ingrid Juell Moe
Leader of the project Genius loci

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Catalogue text for the exhibition shown at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norway 1991, Bohusgalleriet in Uddevalla, Sweden and Aalborg Kunstpavillon,
Denmark 2000.

SCRIPT AND IMAGE – A DOUBLE HERITAGE

Script. Messages. Words on paper, on clay or stone tablets. Words as notes or as long letters.
In an ancient wall, in the remains of a renowned building thousands of small notes have been pushed into the cracks between the stones.
In the remains of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem these handwritten notes carry prayers, cries and laments. Years of wind and rain have
blurred the writing, wiped out the words.
Their contents are a mystery to those who read them today. And yet maybe they are clearer than ever. Clear because we can read
our own prayers and laments into them. Letters are usually communications from one person to another. And they are more than that.
Letters can be an attempt to reach back to an earlier era, an attempt to have a dialogue with tradition and history. And a letter can be an
image – graphic signs set out on a surface. A structure of patterns, of repetitions, of rhyme. As an image they become communication
from a sender to a recipient.

When Barbro Raen Thomassen in this exhibition concentrates on signs, it is first and foremost as a visual artist.
We do not do justice to her work if we strain to read the texts in her pictures. She is conveying images, not text, but images of text.
She is the sender, we the recipients. And what do we receive? Which images does the exhibition lead us towards?
The images carry a double message. Firstly they are visual works of art, as stated above. They intrigue our modern eyes as we see
them as graphic works, as signs, as calligraphy. We are fascinated by the beauty in the structure of the paper or the clay.
We seek the rhythms, the pulse beats, the very breath of the writing process.

Yet this distanced approach, this way of seeing, which is a true offspring of modernism, does not stand in the way of the other message,
namely the feeling of age imparted by these images; infinite age, signs that have wandered through the centuries until we encounter
them on a gallery wall. Maybe it is the artist’s own secrets that have been written down before our very eyes. We see it, yet do not see it.
Mystery conceals mystery in the ancient writings she refers to. And the enigma of the old writings is a decisive reason why they are alive today.
What do they describe? How are they to be understood? It is vital for each generation to read anew, to interpret and re-interpret in
order to approach some understanding of what it means to be a human being.

Barbro Raen Thomassen’s sign images were made with deep respect for both traditions. They were made in respect for that which
has been passed down to us, which it is our duty to carry into the future. And they were made with respect for the force of the image,
its undying ability to amaze and fascinate, to perpetually set in motion the forces of heart and mind. Barbro Raen Thomassen has with
deep commitment taken upon herself to be custodian of this double heritage, not on our behalf, but together with us who encounter her art.

Øystein Laundal
Art historian

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Catalogue text for the installation “Dolorosa”. Torsos in concrete, life-size. “Dolorosa” was created for Bunkers-95 at Galleri Lista Lighthouse 1995.
It was further developed for the Schuvalov Palace in St. Petersburg 1998, and that year for Seljord Art Society. Finally Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal 1999.

THAT WHICH NO LONGER IS. AND THE SORROW

All we carry that is torn away from us. Our own selves that we drag along with us, century after century. The weight of us.
In the weight lies the absence. It has mingled with us. It mingles the whole time. We walk or lie in the shadow of that which is gone.
Once upon a time. It stays on like a resonance in the body. Away does not go away. With the torsos we enter the room of emtiness.
The absent makes its presence felt. We are permitted to enter, or we are at least invited, to grief. The torsos lie stranded,
each in its own desolite attitude. The artist has said: The memory of the lost shall not be lost. So she makes torsos out of concrete.
This is the act of the artist. Thus she gives of her nakedness. Stay here where you are!

Loss lies heavy in the room. And the music, does it move towards or emanate from the desolate attitudes, the bodies stranded,
on their side, on their shoulder blade, on their knees, exposed? Impenetrable bodies that recall to us the porous, the vulnerable.
Wherever we move in the room there is the broken. It reminds us of wat has been, or could have been. The artist has created a gap
between cement and absence. Some took it away, some took themeselves away. That is the first denial. Some have obliterated the
memory of that which was taken away, they do not want the pain of absence. That is the second denial. She and he bear up, or fall in sorrow.
Perhaps we need all the sorrow we can get?

What is missing? It is the face. The arms and hands. And the feet, that I call our nethermost face. You cannot touch the face or feet of the torso.
Yet you know them by their absence. You remember, if you will, that things can happen that will plunge the world into new shapes.
Seven torsos, three or five. Mutilated in the same way, made of the same concrete, in separate attitudes. Is the loss always the same?
But our sorrow is our own. From that you will open up and see from a million angles.

Wera Sæther

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ASHES AND WHITE

In the exhibition ASHES AND WHITE at Galleri Lista Fyr I make use of materials both perishable and sensual such as wax,
unfixated colour pigment and ash. In one of the installations it is the shadows that are projected on to the walls – and which are in
continual movement - that constitute the work of art, and not the paper butterflies, whose function is merely indirect.

In the installation ASH seven real-life life-size elements – a ladder, a bucket, a sponge, pincers, three nails,
a garment and dice – are covered in ash. Also the room in which the objects are placed, is covered in ash. The understanding of any
work of art is dependent on the frame of reference of the beholder. It is possible to see ASH as any vacated torture chamber.
The silence afterwards. After the horror. For any one acquainted with western medieval iconography, the elements in the installation
ASH will immediately recall the Passion of Christ and the Deposition from the Cross.

The two large monochrome squares in the exhibition, RED and WHITE, would in any other context be nothing but pure form and pure colour.
Yet when seen against ASH and BUTTERFLY (the butterfly being an ancient symbol of change, resurrection and immortality)
the non-meaningful planes become charged with meaning. The intense red and the pure white colour recall to us the
prophesy of Isaiah: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.

The squares are made of wax impregnated with pigment. If the visitor touches the colour, it will rub off onto his finger.
His finger will become a bearer of memory. The small red wax squares with deep cuts, of which 14 are installed in a bunker from
World War II and five in the main gallery, are in their context a metaphor for wounds. Wounds that turn into light, both as absence
and as abundance.

Barbro Raen Thomassen

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INSTALLATION FOR THREE WALLS
The waiting room of the Medical Outpatients’ Department
Sørlandet Sykehus Arendal
Paal-Helge Haugen: Texts
Barbro Raen Thomassen: Images

Strange and often exceedingly beautiful forms of SEED exist in a million varieties all around us. In the air, flying on the wind,
carried by humans or animals, unaware that a seed or even hundreds of seeds may be found on their sleeve or on their fur.
They are carried to new waysides, ditches, fields and meadows, flowerbeds and rubbish dumps. One single plant can send out from
a couple of hundred to many thousands of seeds. Usually we do not even notice them as they are so small.

And yet the potential within a seed is overwhelming. As is the richness of its numerous symbolic interpretations. A seed can express
a new beginning, life, opportunity and hope – in its largest sense. This is meaningful to me when placing my work here,
in a place where people wait – in a hospital. The installation consists of 44 elements – 17 texts and 27 images – all about seeds or related to seed.
The works are hung both high at low, seemingly at random on the three walls – as if the wind had blown the seeds just there.

The seeds were first enlarged and carved in pale limestone, like sculpture. They were then photographed and applied with emulsion
to water colour paper. This technique is called Liquid Light, or Silver Gelatine, and is a photographic process. The Liquid Light emulsion
is applied to a given material (which could be just about anything), it is then illuminated and developed like a photograph.

Those who wait have time, two minutes, two hours... Those who wait can keep their mind on one element or several.
The waiting room has no windows. Instead the seed elements will serve as small openings on to something else, another place,
further out, or further in.

Barbro Raen Thomassen

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TRIBUTE FROM LILY AND BIRCH
Two new glass windows to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Birkenes Church 7.12.2008. Artist´s speech.

Down the centuries sacred symbols and legends have for many reasons been linked to plants.
In Birkenes Church white Lilium Candidums - Madonna Lilies - are painted on the resurrection motive of the altarpiece, flourishing
at the entrance to the tomb. According to legend this lily in the garden of paradise was originally red. Red lilies sprang in the fertile
moisture of Eva´s tears - falling to the ground as she wept and repented at having picked the forbidden fruit. One day, however,
an angel came to comfort her and promised that man´s sin should be atoned for. For a sign the red lily would turn white.

This happened on Easter Day.

One of the choir windows therefore echoes the Madonna Lily from the altar piece. The other window has the branch from a Birch.
A plant I felt had to be included in Birkenes is of course the Birch - which has given its name not only to the church, but to the whole parish.
In my research to find out whether the Birch had some equivalent sacred meaning, I wrote to Eiliv Grue, the author of Jomfru Mariablomar.
Eit knippe legender (Luther 2007). Unfortunately he had nothing, but the author was inspired by my question.
After a good skiing tour he went home and wrote his own legend - and dedicated it to Birkenes Church!
Eiliv is here today and will himself read his legend about the Virgin Mary and the Birch for you.

The glass for the new windows is an exclusive, milky white, mouth blown glass from France. The factory that made it also
produces glass for the restoration of great European Middle Age cathedrals. The committee that contacted me on the occasion of the
jubilee, gave me the following task: The two windows were to be “a greeting from the present, in reverence to the past, for the future”.
Whoever tries to run after the past will never reach it. If we are honest with our own present story, however, we may be able to
go into a dialogue with the past. Only thus can something essential be created for the future.

The committee showed courage when giving this commission to an artist who, even though well experienced with church art,
had little practice with glass. That might have been a disadvantage. On the other hand I was maybe for the same reason freer to find new solutions.
As subscriber to the BBC Gardens Illustrated I discovered some years ago a feature on X-ray photographed plants.
I was struck by an idea: Would it be possible to transfer X-ray photos onto glass? Glass is a transparent material.
The electromagnetic X-rays do not stop at the object´s surface, but penetrate right through. Likewise the metaphysical dimension
in life is about letting oneself be radiated, X-rayed so to speak, by the divine light.

I contacted the X-ray centre in Kristiansand and was made welcome with my plants whenever I needed it. For my first visit I had to
go in the Christmas Holiday when there would be no patients. Numerous tests were carried out on different machines. We ended up with mammograms.
What more suitable for a Madonna Lily? Madonna Lilies are, by the way, not easy to purchase. The florists don´t sell them.
And those who are lucky enough to have them in their garden commit themselves to a perpetual war with snails and small red lily beetles.
My father did so and cultivated some first class specimens for me.

The mammograms could not be used raw, the way they came out of the machine. Fragments had to be patched together,
converted from negatives to positives, organized into a balanced composition and then edited. For the latter I was assisted
by a specialist in this domain, my good friend Roald Sandø. Not to forget Tone Stensrud, Norsk Kunstglass AS, Oslo, who with an
impressive will to try out new things, and with a steady hand, undertook the responsibility of transferring the mammograms onto
the panes of glass and then firing them. A great thank you to all good helpers!

It is my sincere wish that the new windows benefit the congregation and visitors to Birkenes Church. Thank you for trusting me
with the commission. I wish you much luck with the 150th jubilee year. Receive my tribute - from Lily and Birch!

Barbro Raen Thomassen

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TORSTEIN – HIS CHILD

In the summer of 2004 the black singer Ann Sinclair and her musicians gave a gospel concert in Lillesand Church in Norway.

Among the audience was Torstein. He sat in his wheelchair in the aisle of the church.

Torstein was multihandiapped. He could use neither arms nor legs. He needed assistance for all primary functions such as eating,
drinking, washing and getting dressed. Moreover he had no language.

Torstein knew, however, how to appreciate music. When there was music that he liked, he made some characteristic sounds to express his feelings.

Torstein liked Ann Sinclair very much. But some among the audience found his sounds disturbing. They tried to make him keep quiet.

Whether Ann Sinclair perceived this is not known. After a while, however, she took the microphone; she went down the aisle to where
Torstein was sitting, she knelt in front of him – and sang the next song to him alone. After this nobody hushed Torstein anymore.

And Tortein himself glowed like the sun.

When the concert was over Ann Sinclair received flowers and a great applause.
She said Thank you and continued: “As I am on a long journey I cannot take the flowers with me. I will therefore give them to the
person here tonight who has inspired me the most: the young man down there in the wheelchair.” To avoid blocking the gangway
Torstein and his assistant were already on their way out. They were called back. Torstein had the flowers laid in his lap.
And together with them Ann Sinclair´s last CD: His Child.

Torstein Kjøstvedt was born 13 May 1984. He died 10 March 2005.
I had the privilege of being his neighbour.

Barbro Raen Thomassen, Lillesand 2006