Artist In residence 2018

May 2018

Heloïse Audy

Through a series of poetic interventions involving objects, installations and actions, Héloïse Audy (1974, Canada) explores a narrativity of the fragment. Her creative process is notably based on fortuitous or planned encounters with people from diverse communities. These exchanges, starting points of her projects, are embodied by sound, images or writing. As watermarks, miniatures or monuments, words play a crucial part in her work, creating a haptic experience beyond the visible. Shaping these very utterances with fragile or ephemeral materials (mirror, charcoal, thread, paper, ribbon), Audy conveys upon them a delicacy that evokes the fallibility of language.

During her one month residency at Prima Ink in Tromsø, Audy has explored the notion of printing through a wide range of mediums including conceptual writing, photography, monotype and drawing. Her work questions the notion of print in a broader sense, both as concept and as technique. In Print/No Print she documents every day in a note book, on two pages facing each other, her slow learning of the Norwegian language by laying on the first page the words that left an imprint in her memory and on the other, those that did not. In The Possibility of an Island, through a series of mirrored photographs, she plays with the notion of the double, inherent to the practice of printing, by creating invented islands inspired by maritime architectures photographed on the shore during her bicycle “drifts” around the island. Finally, she experiments the physical and ritual act of printing through the construction of a largescale monotype collage inspired by the image of a parasitized tree, typical of Tromsø island, that she uses as metaphor for the state of instability and impermanence that she has been observing in the fast changing urban and human landscape of Northern Norway.
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Héloïse Audy thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support.

Lena Gudd

Inbetween narration and documentation, Lena Gudd (1986, Germany) explores the interplay of inner / outer landscapes, femininity and wild(er)ness within a mental / geographical North. As self-taught artist and with a background in European Studies, Gudd combines aesthetic and anthropo-geographical research in the polar and circumpolar regions. For her image-based work, she draws on photography as a process, approach and philosophy, using the medium as compass to maneuver in between visible and invisible spheres. Alongside her photographic research, Gudd further enriches her body of work with found objects, collages and installations, resulting in artistic as well as scientific documents and objects. Together with Antonin Pons Braley, Gudd is dedicated to An Archive of Norths, a research-creation laboratory dedicated to the academic and aesthetic cartography of a set of interrelations between "outer and inner Norths".

Developed in residency at Prima Ink, Tromsø, in May 2018, Collage notes are Gudd’s visual sketches, exploring notably the relation to mountain landscapes as sources of inner strength and imagination. Drawing on Blåmann, a mountain range situated on the island of Kvaløya in Northern Norway, the sight of which has been accompanying Gudd in her everyday life since her arrival in Norway. As Robert MacFarlane puts it in 'Mountains of the Mind', "at the bottom, Mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia". Through the medium of collage, Gudd combines her analogue photography with found objects, intervening with manual gestures, playing with light and transparency, to compress in the end layer after layer with her iPhone to a single Collage note. The resulting poetic “contact sheets” constitute an insight into the artists’s personal notebook, making visible through its exhibition a necessary working step in the research process of an art work in creation.