The collaborative project Open Air Gallery by Paula Lloveras and Fredrik Lund, set within the expansive topography of Norway’s Skulpturlandskap Nordland (Artscape Nordland), foregrounds a critical interrogation of site, material, and ecological temporality. Intervening in the sparsely populated Nordland region—where the international Artscape Nordland initiative situates large-scale sculptures across municipalities—this work resituates wood not as a mere medium but as a locus of phenomenological encounter and cultural discourse. Artscape Nordland’s ambition to decentralise art beyond institutional confines underpins the raison d’être of Lloveras and Lund’s practice here, reinforcing the emergent paradigm: art as inhabitation of rather than imposition upon landscape. What distinguishes this collaboration is its attentiveness to wood’s ontological multiplicities. In contrast to monumental steel or stone emblematic of earlier Nordic land art, the wood series engages the vegetal archive of the locale—growth rings, grain direction, seasonal memory—and transposes these into sculptural presence. Here, Lloveras’s conceptual rigour and Lund’s architectural sensibilities coalesce in works that do not merely occupy terrain but articulate the dialectics of exposed frontier: shelter versus exposure, endurance versus decay. The wooden forms appear both as vectors of embodied labour and as discursive agents challenging the viewer’s gaze to reconcile material fragility with monumental syntax.
