Viel Bjerkeset Andersen: Sculpting time, shaping place

By Celina Tran

There are artists whose work is immediately visible: paintings on walls, objects on pedestals, discrete pieces to be admired within a space where you have sought them. And then there are artists like Viel Bjerkeset Andersen, whose art seeps into landscapes, city structures, tunnels, and roundabouts; into the very spaces where life unfolds.

Viel Bjerkeset Andersen’s works are rarely encountered in the hushed silence of a museum alone. More often, they are stumbled upon by commuters, passers-by, or entire communities who may not even realise at first that what they are seeing, sensing, or feeling is art.

For nearly 35 years, she has worked across an unusually broad palette: photography, installation, sculpture, video, and sound. Yet, whether monumental or intimate, her works share a central thread: an exploration of presence, absence, and the way human beings inhabit both space and time.

Detail of Yellow Enigma, 2024, Asker. Photo: Marie Sjøvold

Creating an artist

Andersen grew up between the sciences and tactile crafts, with her father a physicist at the University of Oslo, her mother a textile artist and teacher. “I grew up running the corridors of those institutions. The adults there were generous and would let me poke around in drawers, experiment, explore. That gave me a lifelong sense of curiosity,” she says.

At home too, she was given the encouragement to create and explore, and already at the age of seven, she had a camera and a small darkroom where she could wind film and develop prints. Yet art was not an obvious destiny. For years, her world was water and the aquatic world below. A passionate swimmer, she imagined a life as a marine biologist until the university path proved stiflingly narrow. “I found myself looking back to the practices that I’d grown up with, namely working with images, objects and spaces,” she says.

Andersen studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry, followed by a formative year in Paris, and then further education at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. Since the mid-1990s, she has been a full-time artist.

Reflections, 2006, Sinsen T-banestasjon, Oslo. Photo: Viel Bjerkeset Andersen

Creating art through the memory and body

One of Andersen’s earliest public commissions became a milestone. In 1994, she completed Reflex Car, a glowing, reflective image of a car embedded in the noise barrier along the E18 motorway at Høvik.

“At the time, few Norwegian artists were working directly with road infrastructure, so I’m very proud to have taken part in the opening of a new field in Norwegian public art,” she says. “People might not think of it too much, but these pieces can become a marker of childhood road trips, or a familiar flash of light on the daily commute.”

Since then, Andersen has created large-scale works across the country: compressed sculptural forms in Drammen, a Möbius-like, 14-metre steel construction filling a roundabout in Kongsberg, and light-filled interventions in the underwater tunnels of Rogaland, designed to ease drivers’ anxiety with luminous breathing spaces.

Behind the Breath, 2020, Ryfylketunnelen. Photo: Viel Bjerkeset Andersen

While her projects vary widely in form, they are united by process. Each begins with careful site analysis: the history, the architecture, the scale, the light, and the rhythms of the place. She speaks of sensing the genius loci, the spirit of place, and how each space demands a unique response.

“By observing, listening, and talking to locals, the site almost guides the work itself. Some of these pieces are massive in size, so it’s important to understand the landscape I’m working with to create art that works with and for the space. This does not only apply to outdoor, public art, of course, but also other exhibition spaces.”

The Rotunda and the Pastil, 2011, Økern. Photo: Viel Bjerkeset Andersen

Despite the monumentality of some commissions, Andersen’s work always returns to the body – its scale, its perception, its vulnerability. This is what drives most of her personal projects and alongside her public works, Andersen has long pursued a series of photographic and performative explorations of her own body. In 50/50, for instance, she stages herself in sculptural tableaux, attaching a butcher’s scale to her form, or positioning herself in ways that expose fragility yet transform it into something universal.

These works are at once self-revealing and archetypal, using her body as a vessel to reflect on humanity, identity, and the passage of time. “Perhaps it’s not as obvious, but my relationship to a body and mind lingers in all the work I do. A tunnel, for example, is not just an engineering feat but also a psychological space where fear can settle,” she explains. “Here, art can become a form of care, a brief moment of pause that helps people through.”

Whether she is creating for a public space or a private exhibition, her art is not about decorating spaces but about creating encounters between people, histories, perception, and memory. “More than anything, I want my art to encourage people to look up, to observe and to see the world they’re a part of. Be curious, allow art to provoke and disturb the comfort of your everyday life. Meet the world with an open mind.”