More than eight thousand years ago, a massive submarine landslide off the coast of Møre collapsed into the Norwegian Sea. Known today as the Storegga Slide, the event triggered a tsunami that swept along the northern coastline before continuing south through the North Sea, flooding large parts of Doggerland, a vast landmass that once connected Great Britain to mainland Europe. Land became sea, and traces of human presence disappeared beneath the water.

Taking this event as its point of departure, North Norwegian Art Centre opens this year’s exhibition programme with a duo exhibition by Gunvor Tangrand and Marianne Moe, in which the historical landslide serves as a narrative framework as well as an entry point into questions of materiality, time and transformation. The title moves beyond the historical event, focusing on how raw force and destruction can become sources of new and unexpected forms of imagination. It opens a space for speculation and possibility, where natural forces come to mirror human vulnerability and creative agency.

The exhibition brings together two distinct artistic practices, both grounded in craft, yet articulated through different materials and dispositions. Tangrand works intuitively and expressively with ceramics, developing a dynamic visual language through experimentation, collecting, and the handling of clay alongside found materials. Moe works with wool felt as a dense, sculptural medium, constructing monumental wall reliefs in which colour and structure unfold through a painstaking yet open-ended process. Together, their works establish a space where the accidental and the methodical can coexist, where collapse and balance, sedimentation and construction become tangible experiences in the encounter with the works.

Marianne Moe presents six textile works, including Storeggaraset (2025). The piece is composed of vertical strips of felt and bears traces of a process in which the material is both coloured and fragmented. Moe uses textile remnants such as old woollen socks and cut garments as stencils for spray painting. Viewed from one side, the colour patterns may appear random, resembling remains or debris washed up among the stones along the shoreline. From another angle, the relief opens toward a more legible spatial reading, where planes, depth and horizon are suggested, evoking a view towards sea and landscape. The work oscillates between order and dissolution, between composition and imprint, allowing the gaze to shift in much the same way the body moves along a coastline.

In Lille Indre Rosøya / Ringvirkninger (2025), Moe takes the outline of a small island in the municipality of Rødøy as her starting point, a site that in recent years has been radically reshaped through blasting and large-scale development related to a land-based aquaculture facility. The outline serves as a formative framework and as a record of a geological formation shaped by human intervention, capital interests, and consequences that extend beyond a single site. The title points to ripple effects not merely as a metaphor, but as a concrete logic in which local changes leave traces across wider contexts, and where the silhouette of a landscape can become a contested image of the future and of collective loss.

Gunvor Tangrand presents reliefs and ceramic sculptures alongside found objects. The works often emerge from a close relationship with her surroundings, expressed through organic forms and through the use of natural materials and remnants gathered from the natural environment and the shoreline. Tangrand is concerned with human traces, processes of decay, archaeological resonances and with narratives that attach themselves to things, surfaces and fragments. In the sculpture Ras (2026), this duality is a clear point of departure. The work consists of two elements that balance upon one another without collapsing, like a moment of unstable equilibrium in which gravity is always present. The surface glaze is made using pumice, a volcanic rock formed when lava cools rapidly and gases escape. Pumice embodies a particular duality, it is the result of explosive forces and violent transformation, yet it is light and porous, capable of floating on water and travelling great distances.

In Landet stiger (2026), Tangrand begins with Moe’s retelling of Lille Indre Rosøya / Ringvirkninger, seeking to recreate the island’s outline through an oral description. A shift emerges between original and translation, reality and imagination, as the work considers what happens when a place is retold. The sculpture holds distance and proximity at once, carrying a major intervention in the natural landscape as a physical and tactile experience, as memory and as language. Extending from this, the image of Atlantis also comes into view, the mythical island state that, according to Plato, was swallowed by the sea in a single day and night. Atlantis functions as a resonant backdrop, a narrative of lost landscapes, hubris, and collapse. It casts an oblique glance at our own time, in which the sea once again rises, slowly yet inevitably, and the balance of nature can no longer be taken for granted.

Gunvor Tangrand (born in 1970 in Vikten in Lofoten) is a ceramic artist who lives and works in Stamsund. She holds a BA in ceramics from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2000) and has run RokkvikaPorselensfabrikk since 2018. Her artistic practice is rooted in ceramic traditions and form-giving, ranging from functional objects to sculptural works that evolve as a natural extension of material exploration. Tangrand had her first solo exhibition at Kunstforeningen i Svolvær in 2023. She has collaborated with Valrygg Architects, leading to participation in fairs and coverage in publications such as Room Magazine, Ark Journal and Bonytt. In 2025, she participates in the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts Annual Exhibition at Lillehammer Art Museum.

Marianne Moe (born in 1975 in Herøy on the Helgeland coast) lives and works in Bergen. She holds a postgraduate degree in textile art from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2002). Moe’s practice is firmly rooted in the textile field, and she primarily works with felted wool in various qualities. She is particularly known for large-scale, monumental works with a strong material and spatial presence, often referencing landscape and nature. Moe has participated in numerous juried exhibitions and was awarded the Finn Erik Alsos Memorial Prize at the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts Annual Exhibition in 2025. Her works are held in collections including the National Museum of Norway, the City of Oslo Art Collection and KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes. She also works extensively with public art, most recently completing a major commission for Tønsberg District Court in 2025.

Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik, Solveig Elise Nordvik