WORDS GABIJA PURLYTĖ

Animals and nature feature heavily in Opdøl’s practice, which ranges from extremely detailed pencil drawings and photographs, to sculpture, taxidermy, film and installations. But her nature is not an idealised romantic one — beauty and death are present simultaneously.

Death, of course, is the more intriguing word here. As Opdøl noted, an interest in death and making dead things look alive runs throughout the history of art. After finishing her B.A. in painting at NCAD, she started drawing using parts of old paintings as a base. “Then it became… different heads and stuff, death came into the picture. I started using all these symbols from art history. They say something about our lives today — about commercialisation, how we just spend, and maybe don’t look under the surface.” During her masters studies, she did some training in taxidermy. “I used live animals at the beginning, mice… And then, the first piece I did was one of those mice I had had as a pet, and I… stuffed it! You know, they don’t live that long.”

It was also when she began doing more personal things that related to where she was from. “I grew up on a farm, and I guess there, death is a part of your life, you see the whole circle of it. And I have always been interested in how people react to it. People find it offensive, they are very upset about it. I think it’s because they don’t want to think or talk about it, but it is just a part of everything, and you should maybe just see it as that — it’s not so upsetting, it’s natural.” Commercialisation is an important part of this — people don’t want to see the lead-up from the animal to the steak, or the nice leather gloves. The cult of youth is also involved. “It is the same everywhere – as an artist, you need to be young and break through very quickly, if you’re old, you’re not that interesting anymore. It shouldn’t really be like that when it’s something intellectual – you hope to develop your work, and become better, the older you get.”

Opdøl’s drawings do much more than expose the viewers to images of death. “I also think there is a beauty in dead things, rotting things,” she explained. “It doesn’t all have to be new and perfect. When I work on something that is dead, I try to draw it with tenderness. It’s like lifting up something that’s ugly, or trash, or starting to rot, and keeping it.”

Popular culture often comes into Opdøl’s work. In one pair of drawings, a cartoon Bambi is juxtaposed with the head of a real, dead deer. On Wikipedia, Bambi is an “American animated drama film”, which for a fan of the original novel by Austrian Felix Salton is rather sad. It is characteristic of a culture which deprives children of the reality of death — after all, in an anaesthetised world, Bambi is much less alive to begin with. But this was not exactly what prompted Opdøl’s work. “The first one I did was a picture of a dead deer. I think I called it Deer for Felix Salton. I just thought to bring it back to reality. The deer was shot by my brother, on our land in Norway — it’s all part of cultivating the whole group, because if they become too many, they start to die from spreading diseases. That’s the only reason my brother would go hunting. I also thought it was interesting that Salter was a Jew, and Walt Disney supported the Nazis. As an underlying theme, that was interesting for me — of taking just the pieces you want, as Walt Disney did, from someone he didn’t like. All the layers don’t have to be visible in the art.”

Another film that has attracted the artist’s attention is the cult TV series Twin Peaks. Sunndalsøra, near which Opdøl grew up, is the friendship town of Snoqualmie, where the series was filmed. “But that’s just a coincidence which I thought was really fun. I love the way [filmmaker David Lynch] creates stories and picks his actors. In Twin Peaks I find a lot of things which connect to my past, or funny things which connect to Norway — like in the first episode, a group of Norwegians come to visit Twin Peaks to buy timber, and it’s just a joke, because Norway is full of timber.”

Opdøl’s taste for crime novels, which have long been very popular in Scandinavia, shows in her art. “In my own work, I don’t think it’s necessary at all to solve the mystery — I don’t want to explain everything.” It often starts with a visual image. Suggestive, intriguing titles add new dimensions, playfully twisting the meanings.

The installation of doughnut boxes and bronze doughnuts, a staple food of the detectives in Twin Peaks, also began as a fascinating mental image. It makes fun of people’s love for the worst possible food, but it is also making something beautiful and durable out of rubbish. “For me, taxidermy is like that. I take something that is thrown out — I only use what is left over from hunters, like the legs and the head, and the skin — and I make it into art.”

Negative reactions usually result from misunderstandings. “There was a comment in the book — ‘OMG, I can’t believe you killed a lamb just to make a piece of art!’ … Well, of course I didn’t go and kill a lamb. Every year on my parents’ farm there’s lambing, and there are always a few lambs that die. It happens. So I’ve asked my parents, ‘can you please take that and put it in the freezer?’ I’m making it alive forever, rather than it just being dug down.”

“Some people think my drawings are icky, but I want them to try to think beyond that. It isn’t all pretty and good-looking, we’re not going to smile and be happy all the time. You have to try and see everything, and try to understand, maybe, a bit of the bigger picture.”

Opdøl’s newest exhibition is mostly about emptiness, stillness, and quiet, and about the artist’s thinking process during forest walks  in Norway.