Get ready for poetry and woodcuts in collaboration
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A year has passed since Mona Grønstad and Morten Gran cleared away other social art involvement, and invested full time as artists. Now they have made pictures together for their first joint exhibition.
May-Britt Bjørlo Henriksen
The Nordic Poetry Festival starts in Hamar on Thursday 9 March. During the festival, a lot happens around the city in the following days. On Saturday 11 March, the poetry festival's artistic director, Kjersti Bronken Senderud, will open Galleri EKG's poetry festival exhibition with a reading from her latest book, the poetry collection My Twisted Kimono released now in 2023.
Mona Grønstad and Morten Gran are Galleri EKG's poetry festival artists. Mona Grønstad will also show some of her watercolors and drawings, while Morten Gran, in addition to the joint pictures, will show some of his wooden sculptures.
Unusual combination
Woodcuts have been part of both of their artistry for many years. The special thing about this exhibition is that this is the first time they work on each other's pictures. Not only do they collaborate on making woodcuts, but the combination of watercolor and woodcut gives a special atmosphere in some of the pictures.
- We found out that we wanted to try making woodcuts together. Woodcuts according to Edvard Munch's method, where you cut out and assemble the wooden plates according to a puzzle-like idea, says Grønstad.
Developing these images has been an interesting experience for the artist couple, who each pursue their own artistic career on a daily basis, when they are not also organizing the annual art festival KunstaRena at Rena.
The artist couple, who on a daily basis live both in Rena and in Ski, have the human relationship with animals, and how we relate to nature, as the theme of the exhibition in Galleri EKG.
- Getting an opportunity to work full-time with art, without having to break off to plan lessons for the next week is very nice. The fact that we can now do art full-time, and that we can show our professionalism in our work, means that we can also more easily develop a common thread in the images, says Grønstad.
Sits in the spinal cord
- This relationship with nature is in our spinal cord. Perhaps the magic that occurs between man and nature becomes more and more evident as the years go by, says Grønstad.
Grønstad thinks that Morten Gran's sculptures are very suitable as comments to his watercolours. That they become a continuation without being completely the same.
It was an essay in Morgenbladet (no. 48/2022) by professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, Arne Johan Vetlesen, which inspired further reflection on the theme in the work they had already started with for the exhibition.
- When you work with art in this way, you are very aware of things happening around you. Suddenly we saw an article that on Rena there is a river that runs through the area of the defence, Ygla, it is right next to the airport. There are fish and living beings there, says Grønstad.
Around such an airport there have now been rules stating that there must be a zone free from, among other things, rivers, and the defense puts hard against hard and says that it must move the river.
- Locally, there is a small natural disaster. What happens to fish and other living beings, we find that interesting. But we are not making a political protest, says Grønstad
Fewer wild animals
- It is the wild animals that make us human. We believe there are so many wild animals in the world, says Gran.
In the process of taking the pictures for the exhibition, they discovered that this is not true.
- Less than six percent of the biomass on earth is wild. 60% of the animals we humans use as pets. What we are concerned with in this context is the small percentage who have these encounters with the wild animals. In a way, the animals become a bit human when we look at them. Often when we look at them they have human features, he says.
A quote from Vetlesen's essay in Morgenbladet (48/2023) that Gran and Grønstad noticed, and have worked with in the process, is; "... the animals that above all make us human are those that have lived without significant contact with us, and without need for us".
Both Mona Grønstad and Morten Gran have exhibited in Galleri EKG in the past.