Anita Tjemsland
Anita Tjemsland (born 1969) is educated at Rogaland Art School (1991-93) and the Norwegian Art Academy (1993-1997). She has shown her works at multiple solo exhibitions, such as the Oslo Art Society, Hå gamle prestegård, Galleri Brandstrup (Stavanger), Gallery Gann (Sandnes) and Galleri Norske Grafikere (Oslo). She has also attended a number of group exhibitions at home and abroad, including Denmark and Lithuania, as well as at the Autumn Exhibition and the Western Norway exhibition.
WORK
Anita Tjemsland´s pictures are based on what she observe and sense in her surroundings. Most often she works in black and white. In her printings she uses plexiglass plates processed with soldering iron as bases. The process is time-consuming and demanding: The plates are processed by hand, to give an organic, vibrant expression.
After ingraving the motive on the pressure plates, and applying ink, she gently removes some of the ink in order to give each pressure plate small individual variations of black before printing. Tjemsland always find her motives outdoor, beyond her comfort zone. In the threatening, indifferent nature and the cacophony of man-made chaos in a town, she seeks to find an emotional impression.
Tjemsland does not strive for an objective, scientific or naturalistic reproduction of the world, but seeks to express an experienced world, as it appears filtered through her subjective experience. An emotional impression, a profound representation of the architecture of existence; its beauty, cruelty, arbitrariness, conscientiousness, durability and perishable fluidity, its sadness.
By removing everything that is non-essential for the picture, and thus giving the viewer room and freedom to interpret, she obtains a space where she can cultivate the emotional relationship of the first impression given by her motives. This process results in an image Tjemsland considers “a frozen truth”, a floor plan of a particular place at a certain time. Still, the poetic aspect of the picture constitutes a process that continues as long as the image is looked upon or recalled.
