Brynhild G. Winther - Home view

28.9-29.12 2024

Brynhild Grødeland Winther has studied for a Master´s degree at Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design in Bergen (2013-18).
See her website for previous exhibitions and more.

About the exhibition:
Home view (no.: Heimsyn) is a frieze, a drawing on paper, 34.5 m long and 3 m high. In addition, individual works are mounted both on the drawing and elsewhere in the room. This is a tightly packed, visual journey through nature and landscape, personal and shared memories and myths, loaded with visual references from popular culture, art and history. 

The art of seeing something more than what one can see, of letting the mind spin shadows and life, of creating beings and representations, what a wonderful gift it is. My mother, who comes from northern Norway, could tell stories that scared my friends from walking home alone in the autumn darkness. The stories often contained creatures that turned out to be something other than what one first saw, they dissolved in the darkness or became animal-like. Her words created a vivid image in our minds and when we went out, the image followed. 

In Brynhild Grødeland Winther’s work, this composite view is also found. The houses can be warm dwellings or empty and silent shells, the wolf can have dense fur and lively eyes or just be an outline with a gaping mouth. The starry sky lies black and deep both below and above the house, a meadow and a flower meadow that hovers between both of these depths, depths that contain strange-looking animals or a beautiful rock carving. 

In the artwork, the artist takes as a point of departure, among other things, homesickness. There was something with the wind that day, on the beach in Øystese, she writes. “Something that grabbed hold of me and sort of tore the threads of my soul and pulled me towards the Lamb where I come from.” The strong wind you can feel from the sea, the smell of sea. But is homesickness about the time you can’t go back to? What is irretrievably gone? 

In the drawing, one finds both an outer and an inner landscape as an interwoven montage of mythical figures, historical references, symbols, detailed portraits, dragon style, forests of Wunderbaum, textual outbursts and reflections. Grandmother as riding Valkyrie is a portrait of an enduring warrior with shield and spear, a woman who does not give up. Little Red Riding Hood keeps the wolf in a leash in this story and the fiddler has a sword and a dragon as mounts. But what about the thigh? And the barricade that she’s holding on to? And where are the astronauts going in their little bubble cars? 

Winther does not draw sketches, nor does she work from fixed plans, but uses drawing as a way to think out loud with her hands. She says she gets lost looking for things off the beaten path. Outside the linguistically defined. There is always a starting point, but no conclusion. 

Winther sees Hardanger as a kind of main artery in our cultural identity, a place that is personal and close in a strange way. Here are the mountains where you can hide, in contrast to the flat Jærlandet where everything is visibly far from guard. Here is the fjord that mirrors the sky and hides the depth, the roads where all kinds of vehicles sail and that bind the houses together. And agriculture that manages diversity and differences, with all the different types of apples. 

Text: Sissel Lillebostad, director Kabuso