M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

“I
often experience that we see pictures
through other pictures, making a cultural
comparison instead of seeing what the art
or the artist is trying to convey” Norwegian artist Patrick
Huse has stated. Born in Oslo, Norway in 1948, he now
lives in Skåbu. Huse has held numerous major
exhibitions, particularly in northern countries and venues,
such as the Lillehammer Art Museum, the Rogaland Art
Museum (Norway), Akureyri Art Museum (Iceland),
Katuaq Greenland Cultural Centre in Greenland and the
Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum in northern Canada.
Most notably Patrick Huse’s work insists on a dialogue
with the landscape, and involves an ecological dialogue
between humanity and nature. As Huse states: “One
thing, which is quite clear, is that our problems are no
longer local, because so many environments on earth are
struggling with the same issues. With better
communications we have become aware of how much
we share in this regard.”
Huse works in a variety of media including
photography, video, and painting. Not only does
landscape as metaphor enter into his visual dialogues but
equally issues of language, and the way language can
define one’s experience, as with the Saami of Scandinavia
or the Inuit of Greenland and Canada. The art of Patrick
Huse draws attention to the time honoured struggle
between civilization and nature in such a manner that
those who are “marginalized” - as things are usually seen
- are the only ones who, strikingly, remain faithful to the
essential concerns of humanity. His most recent
exhibition Intimate Absence, held at the Henie Onstad
Art Center in Norway, deals with the theme of absence
in the territories of Nunavut, Greenland, Iceland and
Norway. This show continues to travel having been seen
at the Hafnarborg Institute of Culture and Fine Art in
THE UNCULTIVATED
LANDSCAPE:
PATRICK HUSE
Norwegian artist Patrick Huse has for many years harboured an interest in the Arctic, its landscape and the people living
there. His practice involves paintings, drawings, photography, video-installation and wall-installed texts, different objects and
documentary material. Here the artist is interviewed by John Grande in an extract from his book Dialogues in Diversity.
Text and Questions by John K. Grande
52
Iceland (2006) and to be exhibited at the Rovaniemi and
Kemi Art Museums in Finland in 2007, The State
Museum of Fine Art Arkhangelsk, Russia 2007 and Sámiid
Vuorká-Dávvirat / The Saami Collections Karasjok,
Norway 2008.
Nothing is empty not even a landscape. The idea
is that the way we read a landscape is very much
influenced by technology. We perceive the
physics of the world much less than we did a
century ago in modern evolved societies. It may
be different in the 3 rd world or more marginal
societies.
Indigenous people define the land as something they are
a part of so they are quite aware of the fact that you
have to work with nature and not against it. In the
Western world we define nature as something outside
ourselves, something we want to conquer and exploit,
which becomes part of the environmental problem.
Joseph Beuys I believe undertook a performance
stating he was a part of nature...This idea of the
object as a data carrier you had in your Reykjavik
show Penetration, is this close to ideas of art as
anthropology?
There is a similarity between the artist and the
anthropologist in the sense that they both do research to
be able to tell a story. The execution of the information
is what is different. But the similarity is that they both
have to do research on certain materials. Any material
reworked into an art object or an art project implies a
research on the basic material.