The Silver Sea, The Lace Border 3

In her latest series, The Silver Sea, The Lace Border, Astri Styrkestad Haukaas is inspired by the poetic language of Rebecca Solnit to navigate the terrain between memory, landscape, and abstraction. The works are quiet yet expansive—emotional topographies that reflect Haukaas’s deep engagement with material, place, and the ephemeral. Layered washes, delicate marks, and open fields of color evoke both the stillness of a distant horizon and the intimacy of something felt but unspoken.

The title itself suggests the liminal: where sea meets sky, where presence meets absence, where boundaries blur into beauty. In this series, Haukaas continues her exploration of abstraction as a vessel for emotion, particularly grief, longing, and wonder. There’s a tactile softness to her compositions—a sense that they’ve been weathered by time, like lace caught in the tide. Inspired by the poetics of language and the natural world, The Silver Sea, The Lace Border offers a meditative space for reflection and resonance, echoing Solnit’s belief in the “blue of distance”—that space between what we long for and what we hold.

Astri wrote this text that accompanies the work
The Silver Sea, The Lace Border
There is a sea that does not map.Its shimmer is felt more than seen—a silver drift beyond language.At its edge: a lace border.Porous. Breathing. Holding nothing tightly.This body of work moves like that sea.Layered, fluid, remembering stone and wind and the hush between.Each painting is a threshold—into terrain not yet named.A wish for wishes. A net cast toward the ungraspable.