Interview by Fabio Lanna for Nordrom Kunst, 2026
Ingeborg Annie Lindahl’s practice approaches landscape as a field of knowledge, memory and human intervention. Working across drawing and installation, she uses materials including chalk, mirrors, reflective plexiglass and coloured light to create site-responsive works that remain deliberately vulnerable to change. In this conversation, Lindahl reflects on impermanence, the politics of conservation and the responsibility of working from Northern Norway, where ecological and industrial transformation is increasingly visible.
In several of your works, landscape seems to appear not only as a place or image, but as something shaped by time, memory, human action and disappearance. How do you understand landscape in your artistic practice?
For me, the landscape is a way of seeing life. This is a starting point for examining the human relationship to oneself and the world around us. I question how what we see in our surroundings is filtered through our personal lenses, prejudices and emotional states. Through artistic inquiry, I interpret what I see, question how we shape our surroundings, and explore our often unconscious connection to the earth. What does the landscape reveal about us?
Nature has “always” been changing. Everything from atmospheric influences, such as solar activity, meteorite impacts and volcanic eruptions have been driving forces behind local and large-scale changes on our planet. Then modern humans developed. This brought about a paradigm shift. In a short time, with exponential speed, we changed our planet. At first slowly, affecting nearby nature and the environment. Then we became more numerous, over larger areas, until humans ended up having a global influence. The human species has now become a worldwide dictator where no, absolutely no, other species has the right to vote. The dictator is the cause. All species, including the dictator, must live with the consequences.
The landscape bears the marks of our short human memories and transformative physical interventions, while at the same time it also reflects our former thoughts and existential conditions. To paraphrase Bernhard Ellefsen: human conceptions of nature have gone from survival to discovery to, now, experience.
Each landscape contains its own ecology, history and meaning. The beauty of nature is an entry point to address a more complex issue. For me, working with place is also a way of engaging with time and questioning how we value duration. As an artist, I pay attention to patterns throughout history and look for connections, allowing nature to inform my understanding of humanity. By focusing on the landscape, I learn more about us as a species. This is a lifelong project of mapping both the world and my life as an artist. The depiction of the landscape becomes an interaction between landscape and human imagination; a method for seeking new knowledge. It is about presence and proximity, both physically and conceptually. The core of my artistry is to show the complexity in things that are seen as simple, and to question deeper structures.
In works such as The Transience of Man and This too shall pass, there is a strong tension between creation and destruction, preservation and transformation. How important is this paradox in your work, and how does it influence your choice of materials, sites and processes?
The tension between creation, destruction, preservation and transformation forms the core cycle of existence. I see these not as opposing forces but as interconnected aspects of a continuous process of change. The paradox lies between looking at nature as an object and subject that can be studied in a controlled manner versus nature as unknown and uninhibited.
Working across drawing and installation, I investigate the boundaries between these disciplines. Through large-scale, site-responsive works, I seek to create immersive experiences that cannot simply be passed by. Taking a phenomenological approach, I invite viewers into the drawing, into the landscape, and into a journey into our own understanding and the transience of art. Architectural elements and materials such as mirrors, reflective plexiglass and dry ice are used to expand the spatial experience and activate the viewer’s presence within the work.
I work site-contextually with chalk, creating temporary, large-scale drawing installations. The performative aspect of drawing in situ on a large scale creates contact between the mind, the body and the material. The chalk line is an instant of both encounter and experience, and manifests changes in how knowledge arises. Chalk is associated with geology, biology and epistemology. Through the hand-drawn line, I try to approach a greater understanding of place and presence.
Impermanence is central to my practice. Destruction is as important as creation, shifting the value of the artwork away from the finished object and towards the experience of making, encountering and transforming it. Whether I erase a drawing at the end of the process or allow audiences to alter it through their presence, the work remains in a constant state of becoming. In this way, my installations function as shared investigations shaped by place, participation and reflection. This working method can be seen as a form of shared anthropology, where the outcome of the material depends on fieldwork on site and personal reflection on themes.
For The Transience of Man at Kunstbanken in Hamar, I invited visitors, especially children and young people, to help complete the main artwork by drawing what they imagined lay at the bottom of Lake Mjøsa. The project was inspired by Mission Mjøsa, where NTNU’s autonomous underwater vehicle Hugin documented the largely unseen lakebed in extremely limited visibility. This unknown landscape became a way to reflect on uncertainty, imagination and our relationship with nature.
Mission Mjøsa is a research project that will be a tool to facilitate value creation, better water quality, drinking water quality and food quality, and to maintain the environmental values in Mjøsa. The background for the research project is, among other things, the rich cultural history of Mjøsa. The lake has been an important traffic route for thousands of years, and we know that at the bottom of Mjøsa there are car wrecks, ammunition and perhaps even traces of Viking ships. Mjøsa is also one of the most biologically diverse freshwater lakes in Norway, with 20 registered fish species, and the lake is a source of drinking water for 100,000 people.
As children added their drawings to the chalk work, they physically engaged with the surface, becoming closer to the muddy reality of the lakebed. The piece also explored learning and knowledge. When I was in school, we had to go up to the teacher and write the answer to the assignment on the blackboard with chalk. If we wrote the wrong answer, we had to erase it and try again. Maybe we have to erase everything we “know” to learn a new way of living in harmony with nature and each other.
This too shall pass was created in the workout studio of Rapida Balanse in Bodø centrum as part of Bodø Biennale. I was inspired by the urban landscape of Bodø, which is in transformation, and interested in how our view of the world around us changes in lockstep with development. How does this affect how we relate to the environment, the diversity of nature, public health and well-being? The work processes our conflicting ideas of nature and sets realism against idealism. What do we protect and conserve in nature, and what do we sacrifice and let go? The audience was invited into the drawing installation with Landegode as a motif, where I had experimented with drawing, scale, perspective and the presence of the audience.
The process of creation continued in a rhythm, with the audience doing Pilates in the drawing installation, pointing to human intervention in nature. During an artist talk, I erased the work unannounced. For me, the artwork works best at the moment of destruction, as a commentary on the art market and a society that sees art as an investment object or an instrumental tool. The transience of the material is important because I want to create an experience and reflection through art that lasts longer than the audience’s time in the gallery.
This too shall pass reflects on the temporary nature, or transience, of the human condition. The title has been traced back to the works of Persian Sufi poets, who recorded the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled sages to make him a ring that will make him happy when he is sad. After deliberation, the sages give him a simple ring with the Persian words “This too shall pass” engraved on it, which has the desired effect of making him happy when he is sad. However, it also becomes a curse when he is happy. Through these processes, I aim to create immersive experiences that encourage reflection on the paradox that we are trying to preserve and destroy the earth at the same time.
Related audiovisual work
The Transience of Time, 2021
Ingeborg Annie Lindahl and Trond Lossius
Surnadal Billag, SBL Kunstfestival, Norway, 12–18 July 2021.
Installation with chalk drawing on a black-painted wall, coloured-light projection and six-channel soundscape, 3.5 × 15 m. Duration: 31 minutes and 6 seconds, looped.
Listen to the stereo soundtrack on SoundCloud
Nordrom Kunst is especially interested in art connected to Northern Norway, Arctic sensibilities and the relationship between people, nature and fragile environments. How does the northern landscape, or the wider Norwegian context, enter your work today?
Working from Northern Norway, I am surrounded by landscapes with shifting extremes, from endless winter nights to intense summer light. The Arctic is also a place where environmental and industrial changes are highly visible, making questions of sustainability, resilience and climate responsibility unavoidable. Perhaps it is this Arctic upbringing that has led me towards a site-sensitive practice.
As an artist, I feel a responsibility to confront these realities without simplification or denial. In this context, I am aware of my position as a privileged Norwegian woman living in a country rich in natural resources. Despite being surrounded by a picturesque landscape, we live in a state of increasing disconnection from the natural world. For humanity, nothing has value until we have valued it and given it value. As philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen argues, proximity to and knowledge of nature are essential to understanding why it should be protected. We are trained to see nature as an inexhaustible resource, where everything and everyone is exploited in the name of capitalism. As individuals, no one is willing to lower their standard of living. Conservation itself contains a paradox: we seek to preserve species and ecosystems while maintaining many of the structures that contribute to their decline.
Research forms an important part of my artistic process, and I frequently collaborate with scientists in the development of projects. During one such collaboration, marine researcher Pål Buhl-Mortensen described his work as “studying the death of nature”, a statement that has stayed with me.
Through an interdisciplinary practice that combines drawing, installation and research, I investigate humanity’s relationship with the climate crisis and the narratives we construct around progress, nature and belonging. Through hand-drawn lines, I connect landscape, history and subjective experience, seeking to create artistic knowledge that resonates both within and beyond the art world.
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Nordrom Kunst would like to thank Ingeborg Annie Lindahl for her collaboration and for sharing her work and visual material for this interview.
Cover image: Into the depths together, 2026, by Ingeborg Annie Lindahl and Marte Huke. Installation view. Photo: Ingeborg Annie Lindahl.
More information about the artist and her work: