To Make a World

Annette Kierulf (b. 1964) and Caroline Kierulf (b. 1968) have worked with woodcuts throughout their careers. The exhibition To Make a World has been conceived as a visual essay — a pictorial world — raising questions about generally held conceptions and topics of debate. 

Woodcut as cultural critique

Woodcuts constituted Europe’s first mass media used as a means to spread news, satire, and propaganda, in the form of flyers, catchpenny prints and posters. The Kierulf sisters borrow from this unpretentious aspect, together with references to the medium’s diverse history as an art form. The artists themselves have called their practice “woodcut as cultural critique.”

Meticulousy puzzled

The artists’ work process is time consuming, using self-carved and meticulously puzzled large woodcut formats, printed in very limited editions. Though often collaborating on exhibitions, they work individually having settled with studios geographically apart: on the rural island of Radøy (Annette) and in the city of Bergen (Caroline).

For the exhibition at Kode, they present individual works from their oeuvres sharing a feminist outlook.

Landscapes form a dominant element in the work of Annette Kierulf, and in this respect the question: “What form should a feminist re-reading of the traditional landscape take?”

Caroline Kierulf has explored conventional views of gender. With reference to a women’s magazine from the 1940s to 1960s she questions: “Can we find ourselves reflected in things from the past in a way that allows us to see our present reality more clearly?”

The artists share a keen interest in the mechanisms that govern and shape us as human beings, whether ideological, economic, social, or cultural. But it is we – the viewers – who must draw conclusions and solve the riddles encountered in their pictorial universe.