Artist Per Kristian Nygård created Not Red But Green, a grass sculpture installation that was shown at the No Place Gallery in Oslo, Norway.
About the installation
During Not Red But Green, Per Kristian Nygård constructed and grew a hilly landscape of grassy mounds, receding into an interior room. The grass sculpture was grown from seeds that had been planted a couple of weeks earlier during the extremely hot but short Norwegian summer. This meant that the already damp room created the optimal growing conditions for the sculpture.
Per Kristian Nygård works with installations and sculptures as a kind of explorations of both the capabilities and limitations of the spatial – space and object. Methodologically based on relatively simple assemblies or collage techniques but implementation often very laborious.
This sculpture had a basic but comprehensive wooden construction supporting it’s 4500 liters thick layer of soil and seeds, and in order for the grass to grow the installation needed daily watering and maintenance.
Above all Per Kristian Nygård is interested in creating a space for the seemingly meaningless and confusing – as a contrast to the all-encompassing meaningful and personalized we surround ourselves with. For example the programmed urban environment, the functional objects and architecture.
In ‘Not Red But Green’ Per Kristian Nygård is trying to make something that doesn’t make sense. But in stead by searching for the poetic potential in the potentially destructive, visitors are confronted with their own intuitive and physical response to the experience of entering a space where everything’s wrong but feels right.
“I think of art as a form of poetry, and I’m trying to make works and experiences that can detach you and me from familiar categories such as profitability and efficiency.
I think the word poetry is the most adequate since it is about both content and form, as well as the unbound form.
There are several good attempts to define the poetic, but my favorite is, and I do not remember who said it, that poetry is when at the end of a sentence you have forgotten the beginning. It can open a room for confusion and create a kind of state that takes you out of the world for a little while. The meaningless in the effective sense, as both expression and experience.”
Artist: Per Kristian Nygård
Photography by Olav Jason Benjamin Havneraas