Lise Bjerkan Verified listing

I work with painting, collage, photography, and text to explore the spaces where memory, feeling, and experience converge. My practice grows from a fascination with people, places, and stories — an interest shaped by my background as a social anthropologist and writer. Encounters in India, the Balkans, and West Africa have brought me close to lives shaped by resilience, fragility, and change, and these threads of human experience subtly weave through my work.

I begin with gesture and intuition, layering paint, charcoal, colored pencils, photographs, and fragments of text. Surfaces accumulate traces of what came before — echoes of stories, moments, and emotions that resist being fully contained. The layers reflect how life itself is built: impressions and memories overlapping, fading, and resurfacing, sometimes clear, sometimes obscured, always alive. My process is open-ended, playful, and exploratory, allowing materials to guide me as much as I guide them.

Often, abstract landscapes emerge — sometimes inspired by real places I have visited, at other times conjured from interior states, moods, or fleeting moments. My own photographs often appear within these compositions, fragments of the world I inhabit, hints of narrative threaded through abstraction. Each artwork becomes a kind of visual diary: a collection of moments, sensations, and reflections transformed into something both intimate and universal.

I want my work to be felt as much as it is seen. I hope it sparks curiosity, invites quiet contemplation, and awakens the small wonders hidden in ordinary life. There is a tension I seek between recognition and ambiguity: something familiar yet elusive, a trace of memory or emotion that lingers in the viewer’s mind. Each piece is a space to pause, to reflect, to imagine, and to inhabit for a moment.

Ultimately, my art is a meditation on memory, presence, and the fleeting textures of human experience. It is a way to gather fragments of life — moments, gestures, stories — and allow them to echo, transform, and resonate. In these layered surfaces, I hope to capture not just what is seen, but what is felt, remembered, and intuited, offering spaces of reflection, wonder, and quiet intimacy.

My practice grows from a fascination with people, places, and stories — an interest shaped by my background as a social anthropologist and writer. Encounters in India, the Balkans, and West Africa have brought me close to lives shaped by resilience, fragility, and change, and these threads of human experience subtly weave through my work.