Sissel Blystad
Topography

Sissel Blystad is an artist who has teased the possibilities of yarn for over 50 years. Her solo exhibition Topografi [Topography] at Kunsthall Trondheim features 19 artworks created with glued thread that were produced over a period of 13 years from 2005. Topografi invites the audience to an immediate and sensual encounter with the contours and rhythms emerging in the works which, if you let them, will appear moving, luring and captivating

Blystad has never considered herself a "textile" artist, although she worked with tapestry until giving up the loom in 2002. Seeking other forms of expression, the artist came across a surplus stock of shoelaces, which she glued in neat lines and curves to vlieseline. Blystad then proceeded to glue thick wool yarn on old woolen blankets, allowing her to test the pictorial potential found through this method. It is not the yarn, or its materiality that interests her alone, but the colours, shapes and spaces that can be created with them. In 2005, Blystad relied on wool rugs as a substrate before turning to the use of cardboard as well-each media is differentiated by her own terms Limetepper (“glue-blankets”) and limepapp (“glue-cards”).

Tending toward abstraction, such artworks evoke various impressions; however, Blystad reads these images as suggestive of natural landscapes and other physical or human phenomena—over any other form of interpretation, such as a means to illustrate psychology. Blystad's works are an exercise in putting your thoughts on pause. Instead of trying to force the work into some preconceived intellectual, or "content-based" frame of linguistic reference, as per the artist's request, feel free to linger and find pleasure in each work's formal play;  get tossed around in their spirals, curves, and their contours and other topographies.

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Sissel Blystad (b. 1944, Oslo), lives and works in Bergen. Blystad works with textiles, like tulle and rug yarn, and has earlier worked with tapestries.Her artworks are included in a number of larger Norwegian collections, such as the National Museum, KODE, and Kunstnerforbundet. In 2002 Blystad won the competition to decorate the Central Hall in the Norwegian Parliament Building, her tripartite tapestry has been part of the Storting since 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hester Gallery, New York (2016); SOFT Gallery, Oslo (2017). Recently selected group exhibitions include: Art Toronto, Canada (2018); Hordaland Art Center, Bergen (2021) and Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (2021). Blystad studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 1964–65 and Bergen Academy of Art and Design in 1968–70.
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The exhibition is supported by the Fritt Ord Foundation.

Kunsthall Trondheim would like to thank:
Ingrid Berven, Sverre Bjertnæs, John Michal Sørensen, Grethe Unstad, De Bergenske art collection by Aashild Grana, Harstad school and St. Olavs hospital, Trondheim University Hospital.