Solo exhibition at Gallery Kraft Bergen.
Space, the old bank vault.
Norwegian stone, found and collected with a few silver details.
Larvikite, rombeporfyr, fauske marble, quartz, slate, silver 925.
“In Berørt berg (Touched Rock), Kaja Solgaard Dahl invites the audience to an exhibition where traces of encounters between nature and humanity are central. By grinding and carving into stone and minerals, she explores the interplay between nature’s creations and humanity’s transformative abilities. Stone and minerals belong to forces and spans of time far beyond human understanding. For those who can read the lines, layers, and forms, they tell stories of shifting ecosystems, chemical reactions, cultural traditions, and architecture. How should humans relate to these meaningful, silent, and beautiful primal forms? What can we contribute and what kinds of meaningful traces can we leave? For Solgaard Dahl, process is central. With an eye for potential and the formal, colourful, and tactile qualities of stone, she finds subjects with which to engage in dialogue. Sometimes, it may involve making only slight geometric cuts or embedding a small trace of something else. Sometimes, it is about the joy of opening up and accessing a stone’s hidden inner life. Often, it is about contrasts—a play between the porous and the hard, the matte and the shiny. She often pairs two pieces of stone together, as if a kind of matchmaker between two pieces of nature that on their own have not realised what they can accomplish together and what new formal narratives can emerge in combination. In this way, she becomes an interpreter of and with nature, where her own physical limitations for what she can lift and handle set the framework for the interaction between herself and the material. In nature’s vast chaos, Solgaard Dahl creates tomorrow’s fossils as witnesses to existence.”
Text: Sara Heilevang
Photo: R. Halleraker / KRAFT.
Enquiries: https://kraftbergen.no