HANNE FRIIS FLOOD

Rolls and rolls of cloth, needle and thread. And lots of both! In fact, close on a kilometre of fabric and untold hours of needlework have gone into the making of the installation now showing in the Tower Room at Kode. Day in, day out for weeks on end, Hanne Friis has been plying her needle back and forth through the swathes of nearly one and a half metre wide cloth, tightening threads and crumpling the vast quantities of material into something much more compact and varied in terms of form. As she pulls her basting threads tight, Friis contracts the fabric into distinctive fields. In other places, she leaves large expanses of the material without a single stitch, creating loose bulges in a bed of wrinkles. In this way, Friis transforms a rectangular, two-dimensional length of cloth into a three-dimensional sculpture with irregular structures erupting from the surface. A work that imbues fabric with movement and life.

The technique itself is simple and far from new. Ever since people started wearing cloths, it has been common to fold, drape or crumple textiles in ways that adapt an essentially flat material to the three-dimensional shape of the human body. The basic techniques are known to us from Greek sculptures and Nordic Viking graves; they are seen in folk costumes and clerical garb. In some periods, the aim has been to closely hug the human body, as for example in the tightly pleated dresses of the Spanish-Italian fashion designer Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949), garments inspired by ancient Greek statues that follow and emphasise the contours of the female body. In other periods, the aim has been rather to create sculptural garments that transform the body, an approach taken to the extreme in the pleated creations of fashion designers such as Japanese Issey Miyake (1938–2022) and Dutch Iris von Herpen (b. 1984).

The sculptor Hanne Friis discovered her affinity for the techniques folding, crumpling and draping early in her career, and some of the details of her works bear similarities to elements of historic fashion. As in historical costumes, the features she creates are dependent on the properties of the materials she chooses to use at any given time, whether it be wool or latex, silk or nylon, thick or thin, soft or firm, glossy or matt. And in getting to grips with the selected material, Friis follows her own rules. While there are widely accepted standards for how, say, a puff sleeve should be gathered, how smocking should be sewn, or how a Hardanger bonnet or a Setesdal skirt should be pleated to achieve the right shape and effect, Friis works “freestyle”. She has developed and perfected her own technique, creating at the same time a distinctive artistic idiom.

Friis’s material starting point for the exhibition Flom / Flood is organza, a gossamer-thin but slightly stiff, glossy, translucent material that easily takes dye, holds its shape well, and is notable for the way it catches and reflects light. The word organza carries rich associations, spontaneously invoking ideas of luxury and abundance; one thinks of wedding dresses, haute couture and opulent surroundings. For generations, skilled craftspeople have turned this expensive fabric into three-dimensional creations to mark special occasions. Originally woven from the finest silk, organza first came to the West from the Orient via the Silk Road, like so many other exclusive materials. But for her work at Kode, rather than fashionable silk organza, Friis has opted for organza woven from nylon fibre. And for the draw threads that pull the fabric together she uses fishing line – also made of nylon.

Unlike silk, nylon is not a natural but rather a synthetic material produced from petroleum oil, with the fibres extruded as molten plastic through tiny holes in a metal plate. First marketed in 1935, nylon was an invention that would prove both stronger and far cheaper than silk. Thanks to these properties, the new material soon replaced both silk and other natural fibres in a range of applications. Starting in 1942, for example, military parachutes began to be made from nylon rather than silk, and in due course it replaced hemp and linen for shipping hawsers and fishing nets. These are not the kind of contexts that suggest festivities and celebrations. If anything, nylon organza carries a hint of resistance.

Having been with us now for nearly ninety years, nylon has also revealed less appealing aspects. In addition to being durable, it doesn’t decompose like natural materials. Along with other oil-based materials, nylon is a major contributor to global pollution. A product made from the oil that Norway has extracted from the seabed and which has made us one of the world’s richest countries.

It is a deluge of such synthetic nylon that we encounter in the Tower Room – a space originally designed by the architects Arnesen & Darre Kaarbø as a meeting room for Bergens Lysverker, the city’s one-time electricity supplier, and inaugurated – as chance would have it – in the same year that nylon was invented and stockings made from the fibre were taking the world by storm. Thus, in a way, hydropower, gas and oil intersect in Friis’s installation. Three sources of energy that have all fuelled profound social change – and each time with major consequences for the natural environment.

Light pours into the square hall from the three ribbon windows that encircle the distinctive rotunda. But we are unable to take in the entire room with a single glance. The cascade of translucent fabric that descends from the rotunda slows us down, obscuring the view, making the room  beyond appear fuzzy and unclear. The colours change as we move around, peering through varying numbers of layers of draped material, many of them dyed in different shades, some of them densely wrinkled, others more open. But the natural light from outside, the result of weather conditions and the time of day, also affects what we see.

Perhaps the strongest association is with sheer curtains of the kind that protect people inside a room from the unwanted gaze of people outside and which soften the impression of the outdoor world by diffusing the light. Yet sheer curtains never block out the world or the light entirely. They are designed both to reveal and to conceal, and in the same spirit, Friis’s installation invites the viewer to discover spaces that constantly evolve as one moves about the hall. In a sense, she picks up the legacy of the textile artist Frida Hansen (1855–1931), who developed her transparent weaving technique specifically for the kind of portieres that separate one room from another, creating tension between the open, the semi-transparent and the closed. Between what you can see and what you merely suspect.

Another trait that Friis shares with Frida Hansen is a fascination with nature, but where Hansen was inspired by harebells, the summer sun and starry skies, Friis is more inclined to focus on the destructive forces of nature. The exhibition title Flom / Flood is likely to make us think of the kind of newspaper headlines we encounter ever more frequently accompanied by images of rivers that have burst their banks to carve out new channels; of melting glaciers transformed into torrents of water; of vast avalanches of mud that sweep away everything in their path including cars and entire buildings; of people desperately calling for help when the forces of nature strike and render their world unsafe.

But it is not just the visible face of nature that Friis is attracted to. She is also fascinated by the natural structures that recur on every level from the biological microcosm within the body all the way out to the vast spaces of the cosmos. On close inspection, one notices that even the techniques she uses produce lines, networks and spiral shapes not unlike those one sees in galaxies or whirlpools; in spider webs, in the networks of vessels in leaves or in body tissue seen through a microscope.

The three works in the Tower Room embrace the full spectrum of qualities ranging from the sensual, seductive and beautiful to the menacing, repulsive and sombre. As for example in the yellowy-brown surfaces of the first work we encounter, which start off soft and smooth like an infant’s skin high up in the rotunda, progress like the drapery of an elegant curtain in a mansion, before quite literally stiffening up. As it meets the floor, the work oozes out sideways like a viscous mass. Not only does the diaphanous material change colour in the course of its descent, it also changes character. It looks dirty. Somehow nasty. High up under the ceiling, the work is reminiscent of a beautiful translucent veil, but the further it descends, the more it starts to resemble an unwashed, smoke-stained curtain. A work about decay and lack of care. About the skin of an infant that has become wrinkled and old – not to mention sick. Or might it represent the inside of our bodies? Or ripples in a turbid river, or currents in thick mud as it surges downwards and hits the floor in a frozen splash?

The work of Hanne Friis invites torrents of often contradictory thoughts and feelings, just as the repetitive, time-consuming, and meditative processes of dyeing and basting in preparation for the Tower Room gave the artist herself space to entertain trains of thought about the life we live and the world around us.

Bergen, Wednesday 3 April 2024
Anne Britt Ylvisåker
Førstekonservator | Senior Curator KODE

Tekst by Jorunn Veiteberg. Veiteberg is an independent writer and curator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Veiteberg has a PhD in art history from the University of Bergen, Norway.

Soft Sulpture

Sculpture came down from its pedestal a long time ago. Today’s sculpture is just as likely to be stretched across a floor as upright by the wall. Or hanging from the roof, as is the case with many of
Hanne Friis’s works. The choice of material is no longer confined to the bronze, plaster, or stone that was used in Gustav Vigeland’s day. Latex, rubber, plastic, nylon, silk, and velvet are the materials Friis has made most use of. They are materials with widely differing connotations, from the cheap and artificial to the exclusive and genuine. Merely by being the materials they are, they are already charged with meaning. Sculpture used to be synonymous with statues, but this is no longer a given truth either. Today, sculpture is a wide open and, at times, contested category. And Friis is one of those who, both literally and metaphorically, are clothing the art form with new content.  
            It was as a painting and sculpture student at the Academy of Fine Art in Trondheim from 1992 to 1996 that the foundation was laid for Friis’s artistic practice. While there, she became preoccupied with the works of American artist Eva Hesse (1936–1970). Hesse belonged to a group of artists in New York who, in the 1960s, were attracted to soft and flexible materials. Her colleague Robert Morris (1931–2018) worked in felt, Hesse in latex rubber and plastic, among other materials. The result was works with unstable, shifting character. That Hesse at a young age had worked as a textile designer, was seen by female artists working in textiles as a further positive attribute of hers. Today, Friis is primarily associated with textile works, and is more likely to be described as a textile artist than as a sculptor. As one commentator expressed it: ‘Friis both perpetuates and challenges textile traditions with her tactile, craft-based, sculptural and spatial works.’ In other words, the distinctive character of Friis’s art
arises from a conjunction of two mediums so historically different as textiles and sculpture. This extends to both her choice of materials and her method. Where a classically trained sculptor like Gustav Vigeland would have used hammer and chisel, her essential tools are the needle and thread.
It used to be unusual to work three-dimensionally in textiles. The exceptions are international stars like Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017), Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), and Sheila Hicks (1934–). In a Norwegian context, Gitte Dæhlin (1956–2012) was an early pioneer. Today, this situation has changed. Textile works of many kinds are common in contemporary art, for instance those of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) and Tracey Emin (1963–). On the domestic scene, artists such as Sandra Mujinga (1989–) and John Kåre Raustein (1972–) work sculpturally with textiles, to name just a few off the top of my head.
Friis’s 2016 work Sirkel, et minne om LB (Circle, a Memory of LB) is her own tribute to Louis Bourgeois, and there are several similarities between the two. Both are fascinated by the needle as a tool, and both have employed latex and fabric due to the associations to flesh and skin that can be aroused by these materials. Bourgeois maintained that: ‘For me, sculpture is the body’. However, as is also the case with Friis, it is most often the fragmented or deformed body, or the body seen purely metaphorically, that concerns her. In addition to textile art bringing to sculpture distinctive connotations of handicraft, female lives, skin, and body, it also represents something soft and often fragile. The vulnerable character of textile materials has been lifted by Friis into a central position in her art. One other essential characteristic is that textiles are unstable. Their flexibility gives them life, in the sense that they are changeable. It’s one thing that they move at the touch of a hand or a breath of wind, but Friis can also get them to expand and grow merely by continuing to sew. She once said: ‘My sculptures have the potential to grow, and because I have to use a lot of strength to make them, the power of creation is also part of it.’ At the same time, it is typical for many of her works that the upper part is drawn together into a hard and compact mass, while the material of the lower part hangs more freely. In this way, the sculpture is both folded and unfolded, stressed and de-stressed, at one and the same time. Contrasts arise between hard and soft, solid and loose, static and flexible, and these oppositional forces are often at work in her output.  

Sculpture with stitches
‘Hand-stitched’ is a phrase often used on information notes accompanying Friis’s works. It is an important feature of many sculptures today, suggests art historian Anna Moszynska, that they are handmade. In her book Sculpture Now she has devoted a whole chapter to the theme. In explanation of this characteristic, she writes that many artists wish to highlight practical skills, or quite simply preserve the time-honoured relationship that the sculptural medium has had to the physical body and to the art of creating with one’s own hands. These are ideas that are highly applicable to Friis. While still a student, she discovered how important it was for her to form material with her hands. The result was a series of objects in latex that she sewed or draped. It is a method of working she has adhered to. The techniques might vary, but down the years her preferred method has been to fold the material and secure these folds with a needle and nylon thread. It is physically demanding and time-consuming work, but the effort is something she regards as positive: ‘Time is an important aspect of my work. I think I need this concentrated, slow and time-consuming, but still energetic and physical work to think and, at the same time, not to think.’ There’s a lot of old wisdom in the notion that ‘making is a form of thinking’, as art historians Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson formulated it in their book on art and work. They argue convincingly that the concept which is at the foundation of a work cannot be detached from the way in which it is produced. Friis’s sculptures also exemplify this. For the viewer, the repetitive work, along with the time that has been invested in it, is visible in the many folds, and in the stitches that bind them together.  
            It is interesting to see that the revival of handmade art is an international trend. In the 1990s, there were many in contemporary art who questioned the status of art based on craft. Socially engaged art and strategies such as appropriation and readymades required quite different skills. Even the need for a studio was disputed, and ‘post-studio practice’ was one of the watchwords in the art world around the turn of the century. Friis, too, worked at that time without a studio, but her ‘post-studio practice’ was the result of her being the mother of small children. Her art production continued in her own home, and with cheap and easily acquired materials such as rubber gloves, nylon stockings, and jeans. Today, the distinctive space offered by a studio is vitally important to her. It is a place where she can immerse herself, a space where the daily rhythm of her work, combined with trying, testing, and experimenting, stimulates the emergence of new forms.

Nylons and jeans
Even though the choice of materials was made for practical reasons during those years she worked from home, it did also allow Friis to work in larger dimensions. For the Forbindelser (Connections) exhibition at Galleri F15 in Moss in 2003 she laid three works made from nylon stockings on the floor like carpets. Their title was also Tre tepper, blond, brun, svart (Three Carpets, Blonde, Brown, Black). It may be many years since sculpture crept down from its pedestal, but the effect is still the same: placed on the floor, a work becomes more vulnerable. It lacks the protection and elevated aura that the pedestal provides, and lying there on the floor it may be stumbled over or trampled on. Soft in character and spread like a carpet, these works approach in many ways the sphere of utility objects and everyday life. I would think that every adult woman has a personal relationship with nylon stockings. The colours chosen by Friis played on the shades of skin tone that make nylons almost invisible when they are in use. When transformed into the material for a sculpture, they assume a new status, almost like an anti-monument. The horizontal placement of the works lacks the vertical elevation of classical statues. And they adorn the floor in the manner of some abstract ornament. At Galleri F15 they could also be said to have struck up an alliance with the architecture, for the gallery ceilings had a richly ornamented stucco featuring twining acanthus and other embellishments.
Fabric is everywhere in our social and cultural lives and is something all people are accustomed to, particularly as clothing. While nylon stockings have female connotations and the silk scarf has connotations of luxury, denim jeans are the most ubiquitous item of clothing across the world, regardless of gender or social class. Clothes utilised in art always represent the absent body, so it can seem paradoxical that Friis made use of denim jeans precisely to distance herself from associations with the body. However, in the way she folds the denim material its connections to clothing are toned down, and it is the blue colour that comes to dominate. Friis associates blue with the spiritual, and art historian Michel Pastoureau has documented how, in western tradition, blue has for a long time been regarded as a calm and distant colour that invites respectfulness. For the same reason, it was also an obvious choice of colour as a starting point for her participation in the exhibition Vi lever på en stjerne (We are Living on a Star) at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in 2014. The title of the exhibition was borrowed from a Hannah Ryggen tapestry from 1958. It hung in the reception area of the tower block in the Government Quarter of Oslo which was the target of the terror attack on 22 July 2011. The building was severely damaged, but the tapestry escaped with just a small rip. At the exhibition, Ryggen’s work was the central focal point, while the invited artists reflected on issues that the terror action had actualised. Friis called her hanging sculpture Nyanser i blått og svart (Nuances in Blue and Black, 2013–2014). It is a work that primarily plays on the symbolism of the two colours, from the dark and destructive of the black to the cooling and spiritual character of the blue tones. These are colours charged with emotions, but so too are the expressive idioms. The lengths of fabric are folded so as to form thick and swirling formations. Strong forces, good as well as evil, are at play. On closer examination, the traces become evident in the denim of the typical double seam of the trousers and the fraying caused when trouser legs are cut off. These were once everyday clothes and, by employing this type of fabric, Friis weaves a symbolic human multitude into her sculpture. Nyanser i blått og svart is quite simply a textile monolith of mankind and memory.

Physical nature
Her contact with the work of Hannah Ryggen at the Vi lever på en stjerne exhibition aroused in Friis an interest for the artist. Ryggen dyed all her weaving yarn herself, and this inspired Friis to explore plant dyes. The slow process of gathering plants, drying and heating them, then dipping her materials in dye baths, appealed to her. The results were exhibited as Forvandlinger (Transformations) at Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo in 2016, where all the exhibited works, in either wool or silk velvet, were coloured with her own natural dyes. The sources of her dyes were many, ranging from bark and plants to fungi and lichens. For example, the work Saften fra trærne (Juice of the Trees, 2016), in nuances from dark brown to light brown as well as beige and pink, had its natural dyes from birch bark, pine cones, and fungi. Plants that contain tannin react with iron to create a grey colour. Oak leaves contain tannin, and in the work Forvandlinger (Transformations, 2016) oak, iron, and birch bark are the source of the many nuances of grey. The aroma from the oak dye bath is reminiscent of the smells of blood and childbirth, and, combined with the status the oak tree has in our culture, this adds an extra layer to the work.
‘When pulled onto a stage devoted to contemporary art, these coloristic impressions tell almost involuntarily of origins, roots, and essence’, wrote Kunstnerforbundet in a presentation of the Forvandlinger exhibition. There is no romantic sentiment on the part of the artist here, rather a wish to highlight that all living things are part of a larger organic cycle of growth and decay, and are therefore subject to the laws of nature. As Friis has expressed it in an interview: ‘I have been working with the same themes since I was an art student, it’s all about how we as humans are connected to nature, and, as nature, we are constantly changing, which eventually leads us to death. It’s a kind of processing of this insight, that life and death are connected.’
There is an intimate relationship with the natural cycles in a work like Forår, efterår (Spring, Autumn, 2016–2017), with dyes from plants gathered from the roadside verge. At the same time, Friis takes it for granted that synthetic and artificial dyes still have their part to play. This embrace of both the natural and the artificial is one of several paradoxes in Friis’s art. That her sculptures are both abstract and physical, beautiful and disquieting, are two others. Several commentators have noted that the sculptures are at once both attractive and repellant. As one put it: ‘Something vaguely appealing and hung with drapery gravitates towards something abject and monstrous’. The colours play an important role here. The pink colour in particular, every nuance of which from light red to mauve Friis has made diligent use of, is liable to wake strong and conflicting emotions, from pleasure and attraction to disgust and hate. The ambivalence arises when pink is used together with shapes that have strong bodily references to everything from intestines to genitals and skin. ‘I often use tones that resemble flesh or skin’, Friis explains, ‘but you also occasionally see spots of other colours – small mistakes in the dyeing process – which suggest that something is not quite right, perhaps hinting at fear or a disease.’ A spot can be associated with changes to cells, in the same way that a swelling protrusion can be associated with a tumour. It is alarming allusions like these that can lie smouldering beneath seemingly abstract formations.  
Several of the sculptures have an opening into a hollow space. In this way, tension is created between a visible outer surface and a hidden, mysterious inner. Whether or not this has any larger meaning beyond what we can see and feel is an open question. As I have already intimated, Friis is not creating narrative or so-called figurative art in a classical sense. She puts her faith in the tangible force of the forms and materials alone. The biomorph formations of the folds of fabric also suggest various figure types. In the mass of swirling material, circles and spirals might easily take form. Both shapes are as common in nature as they are in human affairs, and they are therefore open to a wealth of interpretation. In several cultures, for instance, spiral shapes are a common symbol for growth and fertility, birth and rebirth. But the spiral can also assume a descending movement, serving then as a metaphor for more destructive forces. That we can talk of forces, or energies, that radiate in both directions in an eternal ‘flow’, is a reasonable way to interpret works like Grå spiral (Grey Spiral, 2019) and Svart spiral (Black Spiral, 2019), as indeed it was in the previously mentioned sculpture Nyanser i blått og svart (Nuances in Blue and Black).

From folds to drapery
As early as 1996, Friis made a foam plastic and latex sculpture with the title Folden (The Fold). One can see in the fold a shape where something is concealed, a potential secret, or it can be seen as a representation of the world not as empty, but replete, or even overflowing, with a maximum of material for a minimum of expanse. This last interpretation of the fold was presented by Italian philosopher Mario Perniola. In art circles, a different philosopher’s thoughts about the fold have had greater traction, that is the Frenchman Gilles Deleuze with his book Le Pli – Leibniz et le baroque, which was published in 1988. The fold typifies the baroque as a period, says Deleuze. Its values can also be transferred to the neo-baroque trends which postmodernism brought to the 1980s and later. Deleuze finds folds in nature, in the art of building, and in art itself, but first and foremost the fold is a way to think of and understand the world. It is a perception that seems to break with logic and common sense, for, as stated in the final words of the book, everything is about ‘folding, unfolding, refolding’. As a figure, the fold embraces other types of creativity and knowledge. Deleuze doesn’t write about art or artworks, but with them and in them. His book may not exactly be lightweight reading material, but his philosophy does offer an interesting perspective on art. He emphasises that art has its sources in the sensations, in the material. Artworks are what they express, in their own right and with their own weight of meaning. It is a vitalist philosophy in which art is in a particularly close relationship with movement, power, intensity, and transformation. These are words that also resonate among Friis’s artworks, especially those of recent years. As she has related, her art has changed: ‘They used to be more vulnerable, but now I increasingly see vitality and strength in them – there is so much power in all living things.’
The fold is crucial to an understanding of Friis’s sculptures, but the concept of drapery is equally pertinent. Originating from a French word for ‘fine cloth’, drapery defines textiles hanging in loose folds. From ancient sculpture all the way up to the year 1900, drapery was an important part of visual art, if not a primary element. Human figures were often draped in the folds of loose clothing that fell in waves around them, and many rooms were decorated with heavy draperies. In these instances, drapery is a sign of affluence, and was associated with the aristocratic and ecclesiastical classes who also defined taste parameters. This notwithstanding, very little has been written about drapery as a motif in art, as is pointed out by Gen Doy, professor in the history of visual art, in the only book I have come across on the topic.
For Friis, however, drapery is the primary element. It doesn’t screen a body, but does carry allusions to the body and skin. Doy underlines the fact that the content of a piece of draped fabric need not be a body, but might instead suggest larger and more abstract themes, for instance femininity. This is applicable to Friis’s sculptures. Although there is a high degree of abstraction, the abundance of material in her draperies invokes a sense of something luxurious and alluring. The sculptures are both sensuous and sensual, and I would imagine that they might arouse fetishistic fantasies in people with a silk or rubber compulsion. As structures, folds and drapes can contain both pain and pleasure, much as the forces to which they allude can be both destructive and constructive.
‘Abstraction offers the tantalizing possibility of sublimated content’, suggests art historian Jenni Sorkin. She also demonstrates how woman artists such as Lynda Benglis (1941–), Louis Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Hannah Wilke (1940–1993), in their search for a different language, have introduced new materials and processes that have brought new meaning to sculpture as a medium. With her folds and drapery, Friis places herself in this tradition.

In dialogue with Gustav Vigeland
When Friis shows new sculptures in the Vigeland Museum in the autumn of 2022, it will not be her first exhibition at the museum. In 2013, she took part there in Norsk Skulpturbiennale (Norwegian Sculpture Biennial) with her work Portal. Like a swelling, doughy mass, the sculpture oozed down from a balcony and across the opening between two of the galleries. It had the colour of bleached canvas, echoing the colour of the Vigeland statues in the same room. The word portal sets me thinking of the richly decorated entrances to important buildings. Friis’s portal is ornamental, too, but in a subversive way, being shapeless and exceedingly bloated. She demonstrates a similar aesthetic opposition in her works for Sirkulasjon, where she is the sole artist entering into a dialogue with sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943). 
The title Sirkulasjon (Circulation) suggests associations with movement and repetition and to the circle and spiral as shapes. It is by no means a new theme or motif in her work, and her work Svart sirkel (Black Circle) can be seen to refer back to the sculpture Krans (Wreath) from her student days in Trondheim. Back then she was using bin bags in black plastic, while for Svart sirkel she employs vinyl. Many of the sculptures in her exhibition at the Vigeland Museum are made from various plastics, including silicon, artificial leather, and vinyl. These are materials that used to represent the latest in modernity and progress. Today they are a serious environmental threat and are seen by many in a negative light. Side by side with Vigeland’s plaster, bronze, and marble statues, they represent something cheap, synthetic, prosaic, and lowbrow. At the same time, Friis’s artistic transformation of the plastic materials into sculptures alters their status, imbuing them with elevated and lasting value. It’s all part of the magic that an artist can perform. Only The Sky is the Limit, to borrow one of Friis’s titles. Although she was probably being ironic when she used this phrase for that work. While the transparent blueish turquoise might be said to symbolise the sky, the idiom is more suggestive of collapse.
            The surroundings for her Sirkulasjon exhibition are the spaces that once made up Vigeland’s studio. His sculpting stands serve as pedestals for several of her works. Other works bulge outwards and are held upright by metal frames. These are metal workbenches that have been taken apart and welded together again. The studio, the stands, and the frames highlight the physical work involved in creating the historical art of Vigeland and in the artistic practice of Friis. It is demanding and repetitive work to fold the plastic material into sculptures. It is quite unusual in art criticism to take seriously into consideration what might be termed the production aesthetic, but in Friis’s case it is essential. Part of this consideration must be the acknowledgement that her chosen materials are far from being neutral. They come charged with a history.  
            Throughout history, various materials have been ascribed different values. These are not simply inherent qualities, but also values created by the social and historic circumstances in which they have existed, and the uses to which they have been put, in particular with regards to gender. By repeating the same motif in materials so different as velvet, plastic, and concrete, Friis reveals some of these differing values. While folded textiles add positive form to most sculptures, their presence in concrete is only as negative shapes. ‘Concrete is often regarded as a dumb or stupid material, more associated with death than life’, writes architectural historian Adrian Forty. Nevertheless, the square, flat, concrete blocks receive an injection of life from the patterns that break up their surfaces. These have been created by placing a hand-sewn, woollen object in the bottom of a mould before concrete is poured into it. When the mould is turned over and the wool removed, the negative imprint remains. In the finished work, therefore, we see only the traces of an action and the imprint of a material. Paradoxically, they are visible to us through their absence, as represented by the negative copy.
            Many of the sculptures in the Sirkulasjon exhibition make indirect reference to Vigeland’s sculptures in their use of colours resembling his bronze, plaster, and stone. One hanging bronze-coloured work is made up of two parts intertwined like two bodies in a dance. Also in its content, this is a work that can be said to show kinship with Vigeland’s art. He made both small and large sculptures of embracing couples. Another of Friis’s works, Svart bølge (Black Wave), is inspired by Vigeland’s relief Bølgen (The Wave) from 1897­–98. His relief has few details, but two recumbent human figures form a waving movement.
The motif of the wave is not new in Friis’s production. For her work The Waves (2009), partly bleached denim trousers create a convincing illusion of the foaming crests of waves, while indigo-dyed canvas has been used for the monumental Wave (2018­–2021). Waves are always in motion. They roll back and forth in varying degrees of strength. Friis’s depictions are convincing in all their soft monumentality. Even though the expression has been abstracted, there is no reason to doubt the symbolic force of these waving shapes. Perhaps it is this vitality that closes the circle between Gustav Vigeland and Hanne Friis.