Dear Darkling
UKS /
Kunsthall Stavanger
2015
UKS /
Kunsthall Stavanger
2015
“ As an investigative geologist, the artist has dug out and shaped deep pits in the earth, which have then been filled with fresh concrete and mineral pigments, giving them a unique hint of natural colors. Placed on a glossy pastel-colored podium, the sculptures appear as organic ruins.
"Darkling" is a linguistic combination of the words "Darling" and "Darkness", as a romanticizing and celebrating gesture to the earth's dark space and life - the ignorant and genuine. Like the land art artists, Baadsvig Ørmen pays homage to the earth's and landscape's own forms in contrast to the established sculptural tradition. Water, the earth, nature and the mountain are re-introduced into contemporary global material culture. The sculptures can be read as ecological media objects, which hover conceptually between an untreated past and a contemporary media-oriented world - a world where nature and earth have been replaced with plastic, shiny surfaces and artificiality. Or what does our globe really consist of? Which materials are natural, and which are not? This intermediate position is strengthened by the stage on which the sculptures are placed, which becomes a kind of intersection between nature and culture, the past and the contemporary. The glossy and clean obscure the aesthetics of the earth - the uneven, aged and unclean - and elevates the project into contemporary art; or the contemporary back in earth art.
Excerpts from review Organiske medier at Kunstkritikk.no by Sara R. Yazdani (10.02.2015)