Siri Skjerve and Toril Redalen
DOGGERLAND
The exhibition “Doggerland” explores lost and found land, as geographical history, literary inspiration, and artistic interpretation. Through clay and leather, the artists investigate the relationship between people, materials, and the environment, and they invite the audience to experience a landscape where the tangible meets the transient, in the nexus between solid land and our inner imagination.
Tens of thousands of years ago, Doggerland was a vast area of cultivated land between England and Denmark, before gradually being flooded by the sea later on. Today, this world exists only as a geological memory – a lost underwater territory. As a conveyor of both the material and the intangible, Doggerland reflects our own understanding of time, materiality, and human activity. The artistic exploration of this theme takes its cue from fragmented facts and a mythical approach to blank spaces on the map and in history.
Work on the exhibition “Doggerland” began three years ago. At that time, both Siri Skjerve and Toril Redalen had recently read the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, about a woman who is staying by herself in a mountain lodge. One morning, the woman finds that an invisible wall has sealed her off from the outside world along with a dog, a cat, and a cow. Outside this wall, all life is dead. The woman is left to fend for herself, cut off from the world and forced into a life governed by necessity, physical labour, and relationships with animals and nature. She grows potatoes, milks the cow, fetches water, chops wood. Her body feels cold, heat, rain, and hunger. There is a clear connection here between the plot of The Wall and Doggerland as a lost territory.
The artists also draw parallels to their own artistic work, which emphasizes an awareness of potential resources, a closeness to the tactile, and a recognition that meaning can be found in concrete, mundane, and bodily phenomena. Today’s field of arts and crafts is characterized by an interest in and investigation of the original and site-specific, an immersion that can give the artist great freedom. At the same time, however, knowledge, time, and space are limited by a life governed by necessity.
As artisans, the artists regard their materials as active participants in the works. With their different backgrounds in leather and clay, respectively, Skjerve and Redalen explore the relationship between humans, materials, and the environment and how local knowledge and craftsmanship can be used to develop an artistic idiom. They want the visitors to the exhibition, in their encounter with the works, to have the opportunity to experience the history of the materials and at the same time have their own experiences be reflected in a place that is as much myth as it is reality, in a timeless landscape. Some of the works can be read as a visualization of Haushofer’s novel, where starting over and building a new civilization can be viewed as a continuation of the lost Doggerland. What are new societies founded on? What knowledge is of the utmost necessity?
An important part of the collaboration between the two artists has always been about text, both their own and that of others. The exhibition includes the textual work The Art of Distant Future Earth (2024), where they explore how the future can be understood through a material approach. The work consists of two texts that, in each their own way, describe a kind of primary knowledge that both defines and restricts humanity.
ABOUT THE COLLABORATION:
Siri Skjerve and Toril Redalen met in Bergen, and both have a BA in ceramics and an MA in art from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2007). Although the two artists have subsequently worked in two different fields, their projects explore similar themes. As coincidence would have it, they now have a particular place in common as well, namely Todalen, where Toril grew up and Siri lives today. They have collaborated closely for several years, on projects, duo exhibitions, and their own works.
Siri Skjerve (b. 1979 in Oslo) has explored animal skin and naturally tanned leather as artistic materials for several years. She lives and works in Todalen, and her artistic practice is primarily based on skins from local hunting. Skjerve works to give nuance to and elevate the artistic discourse in regard to this material.
Siri Skjerve has held several solo exhibitions and participated in a number of juried group exhibitions. In 2025, she was awarded the Norwegian state’s ten-year grant for established artists, and her works have been acquired by KODE (via the national acquisition scheme Innkjøpsfondet for norsk kunsthåndverk) and by KUBE. As an artist, Skjerve has had stays at, among other places, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, the ULU of Norway training centre, and in Nuuk, Greenland. In addition to her artistic career, Skjerve has chaired the board of the Norwegian Association for Craft Artists, and is currently pursuing a doctorate at Nordmørsmusea and NTNU, where she is researching action-based crafts.
Toril Redalen (b. 1973 in Todalen, Nordmøre) lives and works in Trondheim and Todalen. She is interested in what makes a material what it is, and how this material shapes both history and contemporary society. Her material of choice is clay, which she sees as not only a material but also a landscape and a basis for belonging. Inspired by Fluxus, she works on ceramic narratives where flow is understood both as a property of the material and as a troubled condition in modern life. She has recently engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations and participatory projects. Her works often come into being as part of a whole in the exhibition space and rarely have a final form.
She has a BA and MA in ceramics from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2007), education in media studies from NTNU (2001), and a certificate as a floral designer (1996). Redalen has had artist stays at, among other places, Porsgrunds Porselænsfabrik, the Kohler Factory (US), and the Spode Factory (England). She has received national work grants since 2009 and was awarded the Norwegian state’s ten-year artist grant in 2022. Her art is represented in collections such as KODE in Bergen and the Musée de la Céramique in Grenoble.