Welcome to the opening of The Confident Edge, this year’s summer exhibition at North Norwegian Art Centre in Svolvær, on Friday 12 June at 18:00.

The exhibition brings together eight artists with connections to Northern Norway: Are Andreassen, Kurt Edvin Blix Hansen, Marit Bockelie, Arnold Johansen, Lars Erik Karlsen, Ragna Misvær Grønstad, Rita Marhaug and Chris Reddy.

With the woodcut as technique, tradition and artistic point of departure, The Confident Edge shows how an old visual method continues to hold great variation.

In woodcut, the image emerges through what is carved away. The artist works with the resistance of the wood, the trace of the tool and a line that cannot easily be erased. It is this trust in the cut, the edge and the decision that forms the basis of the exhibition’s title, The Confident Edge.

“Some of Norway’s foremost printmakers are based in Northern Norway. In this year’s summer exhibition, we want to show how the woodcut still holds great artistic range: from the handmade, slow and analogue, to expanded forms in which artists work with digital drawing, milling, laser cutting and relief,” says Luba Kuzovnikova, Director of Nordnorsk kunstnersenter and curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition brings together artists across generations who continue, challenge and expand the traditions of woodcut and wood carving. Some work closely with traditional printmaking techniques, while others allow the logic of the woodcut to encounter new tools and spatial forms of expression.

Are Andreassen’s woodcuts are characterised by a graphic, often poster-like style, with motifs drawn from Northern Norwegian coastal culture, fishing, trade and connections across time and sea. Kurt Edvin Blix Hansen draws inspiration from Northern Norwegian and Arctic nature, and has worked with woodcut in collaboration with artists including Håkon Bleken and Are Andreassen. Lars Erik Karlsen is known for his multi-coloured woodcuts and vivid, place-based images from Lofoten and the north.

Arnold Johansen works with monumental compositions in which people, identity, landscape and Northern Norwegian history are central. Ragna Misvær Grønstad creates large, surreal pictorial spaces where underwater landscapes, allegory and social critique meet. Rita Marhaug combines traditional hand carving with digital tools, creating works in which humans, animals and symbolic figures appear in narrative scenes.

Marit Bockelie is represented by woodcuts from an earlier part of her artistic practice, marked by colour, rhythm, storytelling and decorative force. Chris Reddy, also known as Reddymade, works with layered plywood reliefs based on digital drawings and cut-outs, in an expression situated between printmaking, relief and sculpture.

The uneven trace of the knife, the resistance of the wood and the precise burn of the laser reveal different approaches to the same fundamental trust: trust in the cut, the edge and the artistic decision. For the audience, this process becomes tangible in the works themselves: in the lines, surfaces, layers and traces through which the image emerges.