“For a moment, Paulina looked like a faery”

Once again we return to Hvitsten salong. As usual, the show was curated by Jon Lundell, and this time I collaborated again with my nephew, Kristian Castro. We went to Hvitsten one week in advance with camping equipment, food and a bunch of stuff to make art with. But without a single idea of what we were going to make.
Our camp
Once we had gotten our bearings, we sought inspiration from the forest, trying to connect to the forest spirit. Our friend Dr. Christian Bull helped us by hanging out and dropping a bunch of inspiring mythological anecdotes. We went for a great trip in the forest, meditated in the garden of Edvard munch and ended up swimming naked in the sea. At the end of the evening inspiration came to us suddenly. The idea was a recognition of what a magical day we had experienced and a decision to convey moments and feelings from it in form of sculptures. One of these moments was when i was looking through the dense and dark pine forest and saw light on the other side. We struggled through the branches and made it through to a lovely clearing. Another was as we were laying in the grass of the clearing, looking at the sky. I started to miss my friend in Oslo, and I said: “I wish Paulina was here”. Five minutes later, a beautiful girl walks barefooted into the clearing. She smiles at us and sits down with us on the grass. It is as if we were old friends. And believe it or not, she says her name is Paulina! The third important thing in that we listened to 1900 Den minsta av segrar on repeat almost throughout the trip.

The rest of the time we focused on producing. We got bendable wood from Jon’s garden and dragged five big loads of it into the wood where we dedicated ourselves to learning a woodweaving technique known as willowing. With this we started making sculptures. Our friend Eli Solsrud joined us and actually made some sculptures of her own!

Eli Solsrud, Untitled

Eli Solsrud og Kristian Castro