I-IIII
Bouquet!
*In the outdoor area
Part of REKREASJON 2024
Karen Pederstad (b. 1983) works with botanical installations under the name Bukett! . An interest in using trivial and ephemeral materials in larger, long-term projects runs like a common thread through her practice.
By reconciling our desire for the visually beautiful with our ambivalence towards consumer culture, she designs sculptures with an aesthetic confidence that appears both inspired and indifferent at the same time.
In the meeting between mass production and craftsmanship, the cultivated and the wild, Karen's work takes shape. Her projects are aesthetic at first glance, but the works twist and turn and make themselves difficult to ignore, and in this way she presents the discomfort in our material and instrumentalist culture. The result is often maximalist, surprising works that stage plants and flowers as fantasy flora – a utopian alternative to plants as industrially produced goods.
By blending the industrial with the organic, Karen aims to create objects and installations where the distinction between real and fake becomes blurred. This blurring opens up questions about what we consider authentic, artificial, living and dead, while the work changes before our eyes. This exercise gives the viewer the opportunity to reflect on how we interpret our visual surroundings at any given time – and to rethink it.
Karen's work challenges our traditional perceptions of beauty and aesthetics, highlighting how our manipulation of nature can create both seductive and disturbing results.
To REKREASJON Karen Pederstad has created a botanical installation where seasonal living plants are reborn as a wild centerpiece in Dikemark's outdoor area. The installation combines organic material with recognizable elements from the iron gate that once marked the division between two of the hospital's main buildings - the Administration Building and the Doctors Building.
See photos from the season opening on June 1st here.
The work will be displayed in the outdoor space at Dikemark until October 13, 2024.
You can find it at the address Verkensveien 2, Asker (Outside Galleri Dikemark).
Karen Pederstad is a fashion designer educated at the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts (2006), and lived in Paris for several years, where she worked for Maison Martin Margiela, among other things, before starting her own practice: the jewelry concept Retusj (2008-2015), where everyday products such as plastic strips and hardware were transformed into handmade jewelry. These were purchased by, among others, Comme des Garcons Trading Museum, Tokyo. In 2018, she started Bukett! with the goal of challenging the conventional form in which flowers are most often presented, and has since delivered bouquets, arrangements and installations to a number of leading art and cultural institutions. Today, Bukett! is run as a conceptual, botanical studio that also works with outdoor spaces.
All photos: Josh Lake