Whispering in the Absence of Water 1

Each of Styrkestad Haukaas's series of expressive paintings is a visualization of her subjective experience of the natural world — often painting the same space multiple times as she remembers it through different, changing moments. For “Whispering in the Absence of Water,” Styrkestad Haukaas shares abstract paintings inspired by the calmness of water, encouraging the viewer to contemplate its existence between stillness and movement. In her own words:

Nothing moves
Yet there is movement everywhere
I go down to the water to relocate my body

Floating stones, the moon carrying the sun and two rivers in a line
Drawing sharp crevasses in the
sand, upholding their very own existence,
One is dry
revealing soft stones,
patiently shaped on the riverbed,
Whispering in the absence of water.

A gentle push, and it all disappears,
Into the land where everything exists but cannot be seen.

I turn my head back to where I came from, where I am going.
Retracing, mapping, making invisible wholes of presumed contradictions