Symposium:
Correspondence - Artists Crafting Connections

ABOUT THE PRESENTATIONS AND CONTRIBUTORS
-
 
Vegetative Alchemy & The Artist as Living Vessel
Dr Chantal Powell
 
This talk examines alchemy as a living symbolic system that continues to inform contemporary artistic practice. Powell introduces the concept of vegetative alchemy: a framework that foregrounds vegetal and embodied processes of transformation found throughout alchemical imagery.
Engaging sources ranging from medieval alchemical manuscripts and Egyptian funerary texts to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas, the talk explores how the body and the more-than-human world participate in alchemical transformation.
Through sharing examples of her own artwork she considers the artist as a living vessel in which psychological and material processes intersect, situating alchemy as a fertile, embodied practice within the present.
 
Chantal Powell is a UK-based artist and researcher living and working in rural West Dorset. She holds a PhD in social psychology and works through a Jungian arts-based research approach, using artistic practice as a way of engaging with archetypal imagery, material processes, and the unconscious.
Her work spans ceramics, glass, textiles, metal casting, and painting, and is informed by research into alchemy, mythology, and depth psychology, drawing on symbolic lineages including Ancient Egypt. Alongside her studio work, she is the founder of the Hogchester Arts Residency Programme, delivers talks and courses on psychological alchemy and archetypal symbolism, and occasionally curates exhibitions focused on archetypal symbolism.
Powell has exhibited in the UK and internationally, including The College of Psychic Studies in London, La Boulangerie in Paris, and The Lightbox Museum in Woking, and has an upcoming solo exhibition at MIRROR public gallery in 2026.
 
-
 
Material Presence
Petra Dalström
 
Petra Dalström explores how materials like metals, clay and water are affected by basic phenomena, such as gravity and time. Her works revolve around observations of the sensuous and physical qualities of materials. She often incorporates low-tech methods, such as thermodynamics, capillary forces or surface tension, to generate movement or development in her work.
In her presentation, she will talk about her practice in relation to time, how she works with physical phenomena as function, and material presence.
 
Petra Dalström (b. 1987) trained as a ceramic designer at the Royal Danish Academy – Design, Bornholm, and is currently taking a post-graduate program for art in public space at the Funen Art Academy (DK). She mainly works in Denmark and Norway, and in 2023, she received a 5-year working grant from Statens Kunstnerstipend. She has held solo exhibitions at Peach Corner, København, Prosjektrom Carl Berner Oslo, and Babel visningsrom for kunst, Trondheim.
 
-
 
Pre-modern and Post-modern Correspondences
Spike Bucklow
 
The talk will consider the cultural connections embodied in works of art. It will start by looking at how fundamental – and usually unquestioned – assumptions underlie all creative work. It suggests that some of those assumptions place significant creative limits on artists and that liberating alternatives are available. It shows that these different ways of engaging with the world are not only to be found in other cultures, but also in pre-modern Europe. The example chosen to illustrate indigenous European thinking is the materiality of a blue pigment, ultramarine.
 
Spike Bucklow was until recently Professor of Material Culture at the University of Cambridge. He worked on some of the most important English medieval paintings which gave him an interest in the methods and materials of pre-modern artists. He has published extensively, from The Alchemy of Paint (Marion Boyars, 2009), through The Art Beneath (CentreCentre, 2024), to The Year, An Ecology of the Zodiac (Reaktion, 2025)
 
-
 
Interference
Agnes Guttormsgaard and Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg
 
Agnes Guttormsgaard and Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg present their collaborative work and process using transparent tapestry, warp ikat, and acid dyeing. Vebjørn began working with his mother in 2018, when textile artist Agnes Guttormsgaard could no longer use her hands due to the autoimmune disease Multiple Sclerosis. Together, they have developed a close artistic collaboration that has resulted in a comprehensive exhibition in Telemark Art Museum in 2025 with the title Interference. Through this shared process, their individual practices intersect and influence one another, forming visual and conceptual patterns that reflect the title Interference - where distinct elements collide, overlap, and create something new.
 
Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg (b 1984) is a Norwegian visual artist educated from The Royal Danish Art Academy and Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. He works with dreamlike slow-paced videos and transparent tapestries. Lately his works have been exhibited in Arendal Kunstforening, Telemark Kunstmuseum, Telemark Kunstsenter. Den frie udstillingsbygning (DK), OPEN (IS), KODE and Sentrum senter for samtiden.
 
Agnes Guttormsgaard (b 1954) is a Norwegian textile artist educated from SHKS (now Oslo National Academy of the Arts) and University of South-Eastern Norway. She works with transparent tapestries as well as large scale bolster tapestries in the past. Through the years she has had several commissions for public artworks such as for Telemark prison - Skien unit, University of South-Eastern Norway, Notodden public library and Tokke council building, and lately her work has been exhibited in Telemark Kunstmuseum, Guttormsgaards Arkiv, Sogn og Fjordane kunstmuseum, Sø (DK) and Telemark Kunstsenter.
 
-
 
From the Cloud of Unknowing to the Tree of Knowledge:
The path that knows is the path that blooms
Aliya Say
 
What speaks within us when we touch something outside and beyond our little selves – that something we call the sacred? And what have mystics across centuries learned from that sweet irresistible voice?
In this talk, Aliya Say will turn to artist-mystics and healers who worked with plants, visions, and altered states as ways of thinking life and worlding worlds into being. Through the work of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and others, she approaches mystical practice not as escapism or sensory indulgence, but as a fertile mode of knowledge creation, one rooted in attentive care, listening, and deep ecological attunement.
Say’s ongoing interest concerns artists, mystics, and healers who approach the vegetal world as animate, ensouled, intelligent – and wise. In their practices, plants appear not as motifs but as collaborators: medicines, messengers, teachers, and carriers of cosmological insight.
The talk traces a lineage of such relational, spiritual ways of thinking with plants – of making art as an act of repair, and of mysticism as a form of resistance to patriarchal authority and the dominant techno-capitalist rationale. In a time of ecological exhaustion and geopolitical collapse, these practices offer not transcendence, but an invitation to recover ways of knowing that grow, take root, and heal.
 
Aliya Say is a writer, strategist, and budding herbalist, working and thinking primarily across the themes of art in the time of climate crisis, spiritual ecology, plant philosophy, present and future forms of more-than-human intelligences, and their wider effects on the planetary ecology. Her PhD research and upcoming book are concerned with botanical abstraction in the work of twentieth-century artist-mystics and the parallels between vegetal ontology and mystical states. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Artforum, Frieze, the White Review, the Art Newspaper, and others.
 
-
 
Cracking the Voynich Cipher
Siv Bugge Vatne
 
This talk presents Siv Bugge Vatne’s research on the Voynich manuscript. In her research artistic methods are used to approach what is widely regarded as an unsolvable code. Vatne’s research starts at the most fundamental level. When only visual material is available and contextual information is absent, careful observation becomes both the foundation and the starting point for decipherment. Her central question is whether methods, media, and processes from the field of art, all developed to sharpen the ability to see and analyze visual material, can be combined with theoretical knowledge, to uncover crucial information about the alphabet and imagery of the Voynich manuscript.
 
Siv Bugge Vatne (NO) is a multidisciplinary artist. She was educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and lives and works in Oslo. Her main medium is sculpture in wood and stone. Her projects also include elements of installation, text, drawing, and collage.
Her work has been exhibited at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium (2018, 2023), Møre og Romsdal Kunstsenter (2018), Kunstnerforbundet (2019), the National Museum, Oslo (2022, 2023), Kube Art Museum (2022), Nils Aas Kunstverksted (2022), Dimensions Variable, Miami (2023), and Sandefjord Kunstforening (2024). She has developed several large-scale sculptures for public spaces, including Tankeplass 2 at the Pilgrim Road (2025) and Furuseth Hageby (2023).
 
-
 
 
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in conversation with Sara Yazdani
 
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on (im)materiality, alchemy, co-evolutions, and art as world-making, with a particular focus on the exhibition The Brain, her curatorial statement for dOCUMENTA (13), and her seminal work on the significance of the Arte Povera movement in contemporary art. In conversation with Sara Yazdani.
 
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (b. 1957, lives and works in Turin, Rome, and New York) is a world-renowned art historian, curator, and museum director. After graduating magna cum laude from the University of Pisa in 1981, she began researching Arte Povera and meeting its artists. This research led to her first major essay on the movement in Flash Art magazine in November-December 1987, and in 1999 to the publication of her widely read book Arte Povera (Phaidon Press)
As an art critic and writer for several esteemed publications, including Flash Art and Il Sole 24 Ore in the 1980s and 1990s, she began curating exhibitions in the late 1980s. She served as a curator for Antwerp Cultural Capital of Europe (1993) and for Villa Medici, Rome (1998-2000), before moving to New York as Chief Curator at MoMA/P.S.1 (1999-2001). In 2002, she returned to Italy as Chief Curator of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea. In 2008, she curated the 16th Biennale of Sydney.
In late 2008, she was appointed Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, which took place in 2012. In 2009, she also served as interim Director of Castello di Rivoli, while preparing dOCUMENTA(13). This exhibition expanded beyond Kassel to Banff, Canada; Alexandria, Egypt; and Kabul, Afghanistan. That same year, she received the Hessian Culture Prize.
Following dOCUMENTA (13), Christov-Bakargiev was a Getty Research Scholar in Los Angeles (2013), a Leverhulme Professor at the University of Leeds (2014) teaching multispecies co-evolution in relation to artistic practice, and Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013-2019). She directed the 14th Istanbul Biennial in 2015, featuring the work of Giovanni Anselmo.
In 2016, she returned to Castello di Rivoli as Director, a position she held until late 2023. From 2016 to 2018, she was also Director of GAM Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin and founding director of Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti (2018-2023).
In 2019, she received the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.
Since 2021, she has been an Honorary Guest Professor at the FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland and is currently a freelance curator and writer.
Christov-Bakargiev’s early career was deeply influenced by her encounters with Arte Povera, and she introduced the topic of multi-species co-evolution into the field of contemporary art through her dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition and research from 2009-2012. She has championed a vision of the interconnectedness of art, science, philosophy, and technology, as well as the healing potentials in art. She is currently researching artistic freedom, embodiment, and transcendence in aesthetics in the digital era, and exploring the continued relevance of Arte Povera from a global perspective.
 
Sara R. Yazdani is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory and Head of Theory at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research are modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on art and ecology, technologies, sensation, and knowledge production. Her work is published in Art Journal, Afterimage, Art & Education, and various anthologies and exhibition catalogs on modern and contemporary art. She has contributed to Artforum, Flash Art, Kunstkritikk, and Mousse Magazine, and is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Self-Sufficient Images: Art, Media and Ecologies in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans (Bloomsbury).
 
-
 
Burning Days 
Jessica McMillan
 
In her presentation, MacMillan will discuss a recent art project, "Insolations", that uses spherical glass lenses to burn the path of the sun into turned wooden bowls. Each bowl becomes a record of the motion and strength of the light over the course of a day—a drawing created by the rays of the sun, passing clouds, and the angle of the planet.  

Jessica MacMillan (b. 1987, USA) is an artist and amateur astronomer based in Oslo whose work spans sculpture, installation, 3D animation, and light. Her works investigate astronomy and planetary science through ordinary found objects and optical instruments, creating experiences that connect our everyday lives with the vast cosmic scales that surround us.
 
-
 
The Alchemy of Titanium Dioxide
Marte Johnslien
 
As a final presentation in the Correspondence symposium, Marte Johnslien will share her research into the history of the Norwegian titanium dioxide companies Titania and Kronos Titan and reveal connections between the pigment industries and alchemy in the twentieth century. Her artistic investigations into the subject involve chemical experimentation with titanium dioxide (TiO₂) in ceramic processes, archival research, and critical studies of the companies’ use of alchemical metaphors. Johnslien describes this as a practice of bringing the colour white back to its earthly origins, seeking to deconstruct titanium white as modernism’s emblem of purity, power, and progress.
 
Marte Johnslien is an artist and researcher with a material-discursive practice anchored in studies of mineral extraction, the materiality of colour and ceramic processes. She works with sculpture, installation, artist’s books and writing. She is an Associate Professor of Ceramic Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Department of Art and Craft, and holds a doctoral degree in artistic research from the same department (2020).
Her Ph.d project White to Earth (2020) is the basis for the artistic research project TiO₂: The Materiality of White, which she leads at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2022 – 2026). Johnslien collaborates closely with Associate Professor in Art History Ingrid Halland, who leads the sister project TiO₂: How Norway Made the World Whiter at the University of Bergen.
Johnslien has exhibited extensively in Norway and participated in international exhibitions and biennials (Survival Kit, Latvia and Havana Biennial), and her works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, KODE Art Museums, Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Lillehammer Kunstmuseum, and Haugar Kunstmuseum. Marte Johnslien is represented by Galleri Riis, Oslo, where she will present the final exhibition of the TiO2 project in April 2026.
The symposium Correspondence – Artists Crafting Connections, at Kunstnernes Hus, 2026, is organised by Johnslien as a concluding part of the research project TiO₂: The Materiality of White, funded by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.