PRIME FOCUS - Magnhild Øen Nordahl

Imagine if every element in the world was made out of the same string, only tied into different types of knots, writes Kristian Vistrup Madsen in Phaidon’s new book Prime: Art’s Next Generation . "Such was the mathematical theory of knots that emerged in the eighteenth century: one knot for lead, one for nitrogen, one for helium.

In her 2014 project Occupational Knots , Magnhild Øen Nordahl used colored rope to represent elements according to the theory. Beautiful, sculptural, and delicate, they hang from the wall like flowers left to dry. Even in the attempt to give form to pure knowledge, materials escape, act out, and produce something else as well. This “something else” is one definition of what art is—and Nordahl’s art in particular.

Magnhild Øen Nordahl – Secret Support #2 (2019)

The mathematical knot theory, unlikely as it sounds, is not so far from the modern concept of DNA and not so far either from the burgeoning field of 3D printing. For her series Secret Support (2019), Nordahl took the fundamental scaffold that is repeated endlessly when producing 3D-printed objects and translated the form into sculptures over a meter in height and made out of anodized aluminum tubes in luminous green, blue, orange, and red. These strange shapes, which look like a lighting truss or playground architecture, were dropped into the epic Norwegian landscape as if to make visible something that was already there. The design of the scaffolding is patented and may not be copied, so Nordahl had to reconstruct it manually from digital files. It is by such instances of irony, when the sheen of reality is ruptured and its underlying structure made clear, that Nordahl’s work takes place.

Magnhild Øen Nordahl – Objects at Hand (2022)

Technology is not developed in a vacuum; it has specific histories, and gaining knowledge of those histories allows us to understand why things are made the way they are. Through her research into 3D rendering programs, Nordahl came across the “Utah teapot,” a computer-generated teapot from the mid-1970s, which has become ubiquitous as a test item in 3D modeling software. Just as Secret Support required a translation from file to physicality, in the video How to Make a Utah Teapot (2016), Nordahl asks an experienced ceramicist to craft the pot in clay. We watch her hands move deftly, securely, calmly. In an interview with Hans Carlsson, Nordahl said about the work, “I actually had to re-film some shots, and I could mix the new footage with the existing sound recording because she does things in exactly the same rhythm each time she makes the teapot.” In Nordahl’s work, translation is not a one-way street. She helps us to see when technology expands beyond its own boundaries, turning into art, as well as when human hands become so dexterous as to be mechanical. Both are equally impressive—perhaps merely different knots tied from the same string." - Kristian Vistrup Madsen.

Magnhild Øen Nordahl – Installation view of Objects at Hand (2022): Holder (2020), Explode Mesh II (2022, #6 Secret Support (2019)

Nordahl is one of over a hundred contemporary artists to be featured in Prime: Art's Next Generation ,  Phaidon's new survey of promising contemporary artists. We asked her a few questions about her life and art. When you've read the story take a look at Nordahl's artist page on Artspace.

How would you describe what you do? I use sculpture as a way to examine things that I am wondering about. My main interest is abstraction, that is how we simplify the complex sensory world into abstract concepts, and how these abstractions become productive for how we look at, and construct the world around us. Making sculptures is a way for me to pick apart and study abstractions, and to make new sculptural versions of them. The abstractions I work with often come from the natural sciences and more recently from 3D-modeling, both areas that operate through a language of geometry.