Spirit Rapping
Solo exhibition, Galleri Hvelvet, Oseana kunst og kultursenter, Os, Norway, 2024
Spirit Rapping
Galleri Hvelvet, Oseana kunst og kultursenter, Os, Norway, 2024
‘Spirit Rapping’ brings together photographs, sculptural elements, scent and light within an installation divided into two by black PVC strips. Commonly used in cold-storage environments to separate areas of differing
temperatures, the material creates a physical boundary through the gallery while remaining permeable: bodies can pass through it, light is reflected from its surface, and its distinctive scent spreads beyond the division it creates.
The photographs were made during fieldwork at Rainbow Valley (Wurre) in Australia’s Northern Territory, a culturally significant landscape for the Upper Southern Arrernte people, its Traditional Owners. Rather than photographing the monumental sandstone formations for which the area is known, Nel turned her attention towards the ground, recording tracks and impressions in the sand left by animals and insects whose bodies remain outside the frame.
The installation brings these traces into relation with structures of separation and preservation. The PVC divides one environment from another, while the photographs originate from a landscape itself delineated as a protected reserve. Yet these boundaries remain unstable: scent travels across them, reflections appear on both sides, and the traces in the photographs register movements that do not conform to the divisions imposed upon a landscape.
Across the work, presence is encountered indirectly — through tracks, scent, reflected light and material traces of something having passed through.
Is the reserve preservation or storage? What is certain is that the scent from the vertical blinds that divide the room cannot be stopped but spreads everywhere. And the black curtain also functions as a mirror. From both sides.
Archival digital prints, 100 x 76 cm, Edition of 3 + 2AP