Since we are continuously dazzled by myriads of minimal motions, why should we be able to see that they are going to burst into a huge change? While we struggle to keep safe our own lives, how can we expect to notice the universal warning signal for the critical transition?
These are the questions on which is based the collaboration between the norwegian artist Tone Kristin Bjordam and the musician Marten Scheffer, completed with an amazing upshot: “Critical Transition”, the perfect junction between art and science.
“Critical Transition” is an artistic visualization of processes that keep happening around us, silently. It’s the staging of a system evolution, that gradually builds up untill it reaches a tipping point where everything suddenly changes, in order to get a new stasis and rebuilt itself in a new state: these sequences are clearly articulated in the video, each one in a 10 minutes-long chapter.
Inspired by science of perception and form, Bjordam’s works can be perceived as moving abstract paintings, with clear references to chemical process and a a traditional romantic art. The emotional component is melted in a soft, quiet atmosphere that communicates a sense of inevitability: with a seductive imaginary we find ourselves lost in a cascade of colours that slowly assumes the shape of some knowable forms, such as plants, smoke, clouds and corals.
Bjordam has also explored the possibilities of optical techniques, through the photography of fragments and surfaces in nature, and above all through the fascination for rocks and crystal dating from her childhood: it’s the fact that a solid rock had, at some point, to go through a radical transformation in order to get the present state. This early passion for forms and abstraction in nature still influence her artistic work.
Northern Europe Art Today 