The Guest Studio at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratoriet is a resource that is offered to professional artists who might profit from a sustained period of work at Vestfossen. The studio is part of Arena Vestfossen, a studio collective that is housed in the same building as VKL. One of the purposes of the Guest Studio is to contribute to an exchange of artistic ideas among both Norwegian and foreign artists. Ellen Henriette Suhrke was guest artist at the studio in July 2016.

 

Ellen Henriette Suhrke was born in 1984 in Rana, and today lives and works in Oslo. She studied at Kuvataideakatemia in Helsinki, and at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, where she gained her master’s degree in Fine Art in 2013. Suhrke’s work can be described as meditations about nature and culture, with human relationships to the environment at their core. Meticulous planning and background study underpins each project, but space is always left for the unexpected and the poetic.

 

 

Photo: Ayatgali Tuleubek

 

 

Touch Tours
by Ellen Henriette Suhrke

 

The idea for my project “Touch Tours” came to me while on a study trip to Rome. At the Villa Borghese, I noticed that a blind woman had been given permission to touch the sculptures. In a way, she came much closer to the works than all the sighted visitors. Back in Oslo, I arranged touch tours for the blind at The Botanical Garden, during which the participants were encouraged to use their sense of touch. 

 

My video “Touch Tours” follows one of these tours, showing a blind woman being given a personal guided tour of the botanical garden by one of the gardeners. Visual impressions are replaced by the information gathered by touch and smell, and the way the plants are examined by the nose and fingertips evokes a mimetic reaction in the viewer.

 

In order for the video to be enjoyed by blind people, an audio description of “Touch Tours”was prepared by artist and author Inger Wold Lund. She has translated the visual information into a description which has been recorded as an independent audio track. In the short time each scene is on screen, and without impairing the poetic quality of the language, she provides a precise interpretation of what she sees. I have also produced a series of tactile postcards to go with the video, on which excerpts from the audio description are reproduced in braille across stills from the film.

 

“Touch Tours” was shown in the exhibition space at Podium in Oslo in August–September 2016. The video was projected in large format onto a canvas hanging from the ceiling, while the audio description was played as a soundtrack on headphones at one end of the room. The postcards were mounted on the wall. As part of the exhibition, visitors could sign up for a guided tour of the Botanical Garden, during which sighted participants were blindfolded.

 

 

Photo: Ayatgali Tuleubek

 

My residency at the Guest Studio of Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium was just one month before the Podium exhibition, so much of my time there was spent on final preparations. I also produced there a series of six different tactile postcards. Each postcard had a description of the image in braille, so that it could be read both with the eye and the fingers. During my residency, I also worked on handwritten texts in braille, and on ideas for a tactile book of photographs that had both images and braille descriptions. The book would be made with the same technique that was used for the postcards for the Podium exhibition, and would consist of stills from the film, across which there would be a pattern of transparent braille describing the image. My aim is to create a book in which the shown and the described are given equal weight, which can be read using the fingers, and where the sighted reader can discover the aesthetic quality of braille, with its light and shade. The book is expected to be published by Multipress Forlag in 2017.

 

 

Photo: Ayatgali Tuleubek

 

Photo: Ellen Henriette Suhrke

 

Photo: Ellen Henriette Suhrke

 

Photo: Ellen Henriette Suhrke

 

Photo: Ellen Henriette Suhrke