About the exhibition
How can we find hope in an ever-changing world marred by natural decline and climate crisis? How to discover things that allow us to recognise ourselves in nature, which perhaps leads us to experience more empathy with other beings, thereby treating them better?
The exhibition title is from Shakespeare’s play As you like it, published in 1623, which describes how nature slowly reclaims the creations of civilisation.
Following countless hours spent grieving our treatment of nature, Marianne Morild sought to find something to elevate these thoughts and let her visualise them through paintings and clay sculptures. Morild found the answer in a small tuft of lichen growing on a tree stump. The shapes of the tiny growths in this small colony got her thinking about how humans have always come together for things like prayer, conversation or rebellion.
This kinship between two so profoundly different living beings became the starting point for an artistic exploration. In her work with the paintings for this exhibition, she has also drawn inspiration from stave church portals, where humans, animals and plants are woven together in intricate and inextricable patterns. In these motifs, nature plays the main part, with tiny life forms taking on human proportions. In many ways, the exhibition is a kind of conversation with nature, where it looks at us as much as we look back at it.
Marianne Morild (b.1972) has an MA Fine Art Degree from Central St. Martin's College of Art in London. She lives and works in Bergen. Her work has been exhibited at, among others, Kunsthall 3,14 (Bergen, 2021), Center Pompidou-Metz (France, 2021) and the Taipei Biennale (Taiwan, 2020).
