Topographies of Loss and Renewal 1

In this series, Astri Styrkestad Haukaas explores landscapes as both external terrains and inner geographies—geological and bodily, layered with memory, scars, and renewal. Her paintings unfold as slow maps where rivers, folds, and sediments become metaphors for veins, breath, and lived experience. Creation and erosion are inseparable here, echoing the cycles of dormancy, death, and regrowth that shape both land and self. Influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s reflections on geographies of story and Arne Næss’s deep ecology, Haukaas approaches painting as a practice of attentiveness, a way of befriending the nonhuman and acknowledging our embeddedness within nature’s rhythms.

Circling questions of belonging and loss, the works bear witness to the traces of time and connection—how landscapes leave marks on us, and how we in turn leave marks on them. What begins as an exploration of ecological processes becomes an intimate meditation on presence and impermanence, inviting a quiet empathy for both the human and more-than-human worlds.