Installation with casts of whale and seal bones, paintings, graphic prints, felt and more.

A minke whale skull is one of the focal points of Inghild Karlsen's exhibition Lott/Lotto. Exhibited animal skeletons are perhaps something many associate with zoological museums, where they are often presented as part of a larger, systematic scientific order. In Lott/Lotto, a different kind of order applies, and the whale plays a different role.

Bones and skulls of whales and seals have often played a role in Inghild Karlsen's installations, both in their primary form, or as casts in various materials. The capture of these animals has at times been very controversial, but Karlsen's use of these objects has not taken the form of any unambiguous debate for or against. Still, she gives them weight and the opportunity to mean something. Human bones and skulls have traditionally been a motif in Western art that reminds us of the transience of life. Here, the remains of animals are given a symbolic space.

Another central element in Lott/Lotto is felt, in the form of a number of different sculptures, shapes and objects made of wool felt. The felt is a material with which Karlsen has had a long-term relationship. She says it was the felt that made her own world of ideas agree in relation to being an artist, which made it possible for her to include her own history and experience in art. She started working with felt in the 1970s, while she was still a student, and since then she has constantly returned to it.

Felting is considered to be the oldest way of producing textiles. Traditional felting takes place by moistening unspun wool (Karlsen uses warm water and soap) and then pressing, pounding and rubbing with body force and simple tools. This process — which is called felting — causes the small irregularities in the surface of the wool's fibers to hook into each other and the result is a mat of wool.

Neither animal bones nor felt belong to the traditional materials in Western art tradition. But if the art history space is smaller, then the natural and cultural history spaces they come from are so much bigger. And it is precisely in such landscapes, beyond the traditional forms and formats of art, that Karlsen has worked in many of his projects and exhibitions.

But no rule without exception – which applies to a very large extent to Inghild Karlsen's art, where it is difficult to spot rules, at least rules that are observed – and Lott/Lotto also includes a larger series of marker paintings. They are all made over the same basic shape, where small circles or dots are placed on the paper and fill the surfaces from edge to edge. The figures can resemble both signs and something organically under development. They are restless but at the same time persistent, variations on a theme, or attempts at repetitions that are never quite the same. The small irregularities and differences remind us of the movement, the repetitions of time.

About Ingild Karlsen

The visual artist Inghild Karlsen became a household name a few years after her first solo exhibition in 1979. When her installation Scarecrows on an islet outside Mandal was sawn down during a dark night in 1984, both the young artist and the radically new artistic expressions that now had reached the attention of Norway, the media and the general public.

Karlsen has repeatedly been singled out as a representative of new tendencies and ways of working that emerged in Norwegian art from the 1980s. Among other things, she was one of the first artists to work with installations in Norway, a form which, since the beginning of the 1980s, has gone from being marginal to becoming a central form of expression in contemporary art.

Karlsen was also a pioneer in Norway in his work with performance art and collaboration with stage artists and playwrights. In the 1980s, she collaborated with the playwright Cecilie Løveid and the Danes Kirsten Delholm and Willie Flindt, the founders of one of the Nordic countries' best-known performance groups, Hotel Pro Forma. She has also been highlighted for her early use of video as an art form.

Northern areas and Northern Norway in particular have had an important role in Inghild Karlsen's art. Through themes, motifs and materials, a large part of her artistry has been particularly linked to these parts of the world. In a number of installations and performances, Karlsen has taken as a starting point concrete cultural history, landscape and way of life in Arctic and sub-Arctic areas. The relationship between nature and culture has been a recurring theme. At the same time, her works appear neither purely retrospective nor nostalgic. Often it is the ability to lift something larger and more general from concrete individual objects and phenomena that characterizes art.

The fact that Karlsen has made work processes - such as felting - part of exhibitions, and allowed performance and installation to flow into each other, has led many to point to movement as a characteristic part of her artistic production. There is also a form of movement in her frequent yawning