ANIMA
Ingeborg Løvdal investigates how to transform separateness into connectedness and redrawing into a returning home.Within nature’s cycles, through repeated wanderings and quiet observations, she documents how everything withers, only to return. Løvdal presents visual surfaces that invite feeling more than understanding. With a strong visual rhythm and a sensitive handling of light, her work moves in a poetic and meditative, yet raw register. Løvdal´s playful exploration of loss and belonging allows what trembles beneath the surface to slowly rise, drawing the viewer into a subtle, quietly unfolding world.Her work may evoke associations with Mark Rothko — in the way landscape emerges more as an interior space than as external geography. There is a rawness in how she isolates elements that has lead viewers to think of Rothko´s strong emotional and contemplative fields of colors. In Løvdal´s composition there seems also to be some echo of Rothko´s layers, a recognition she received humbled when first mentioned.
Drawn by the wild storms and the mesmerizing light of her upbringing, Ingeborg Løvdal returned to Norway’s west coast at the age of 37, having left her hometown already at 17. What began as a dream of refuge — an untouched island shore, new and unknown to both herself, her husband and two young children— slowly turned into a personal struggle.
Following a severe brain infection and complications from tick bites, she spent years living with the long aftereffects of illness. The physical world around her narrowed to a 50-meter radius — a circle that would later become the quiet frame for her first artist’s book:
“I could not walk far, so I learned to go deeper.
Finishing her book, Løvdal writes:
«Early last fall, I asked my son if he’d be comfortable wearing his karate gi one late September night, and go outside to enter his silence, performing kata. He agreed.
This past year’s artwork was, in part, initiated by his vivid connection to the natural world around us — and by my own pull into memories of a childhood shaped by intense experiences in nature, as well as the deep imprint of many years of illness, spent so intensely in this very place we live.
Last night, as I was wrestling with the final details of my photobook, he came to me and said:
“Mamma, it’s midnight. Do you want to come out on the terrace with me for a little break — just to look at the blue hour?”
At some point during this process, a quiet vision began to take form: to embrace and honour the spirit dwelling in this place we call ours.
Last night he was drawn down to the shoreline in the moonlight».
I grabbed my camera, nearly trembling from the beauty — from the eagerness to capture it.
Then he said:
“Mamma, don’t worry about being quick. I just really like being here.”
I’m back where I started.
And the circle continues.