In Liv Tandrevold Eriksen’s paintings, time becomes visible. Through the interplay of movement, water, pigment and canvas, the painting is built up layer by layer. Some areas are chaotic, with multiple layers where the form almost dissolves, as if she is constantly changing her mind and returning to what came before. Elsewhere, the surface is bare and simple. The layers and flakes reveal the time she has spent, the path she has travelled, yet on the canvas, everything happens at once.

Time also creates layers in people. Experiences, memories, thoughts and moods accumulate on top of one another. The thin can become thick, the fragile complex, and the transparent opaque. Like skin, the canvas is a surface that both separates and connects, a boundary that is not necessarily sealed.

In Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis writes about how water connects humans with other forms of life. This idea has been part of Eriksen’s reflections on her own practice — water is not merely a material, but an element in constant movement and circulation. It has passed through us, through the earth, animals and plants. It flows from place to place, up into the sky and down into the sea. It rains, evaporates, freezes and melts. And all the while, it carries particles from places and times that came before, binding everything together.

The lightness and sketch-like quality of her motifs, and the areas of the paintings where the brushstrokes appear as inflated lines, point back to a period when Eriksen worked primarily with drawing and paper. More recent works on paper have served as starting points for several of the works in the exhibition. What began on paper has been shifted, altered and placed within a new context, where its source can be difficult to trace.

Eriksen allows the work to play and search, to wait, to float and to flake. This openness allows for a transparency in which both the traces of time passing and the accumulated image exist side by side.