In Earthbound Echo, RAM Galleri presents Ingrid Aarvik Berge’s first solo exhibition in Oslo, featuring a new body of textile works. Her practice brings together craftsmanship, sensory experience, and a deep-rooted connection to the landscape.

The works explore our intimate kinship with nature and the distinctive ways in which we relate to our surroundings. Berge works with the traditional intarsia technique, dyeing, cutting, and hand-stitching wool fabric into intricate compositions. She uses colour and the inherent qualities of the material as a means of exploring, creating, and searching for spaces – clearings, passages, openings, and shifts.

A central aspect of Berge’s practice is her life on a smallholding, lived in close attunement with the cycles of nature. This environment has become a site for developing an embodied knowledge of ecology, biodiversity, and traditional craft. Such knowledge is not abstract, but acquired through physical work: through the hands, through repetition, and through sustained attention. It is this embodied way of experiencing and understanding the world that provides the foundation for the works in the exhibition.

The works are rooted in direct observation. They often begin outdoors, in the landscape, where impressions are experienced and recorded as sketches on paper before being translated and further developed in textile. The movement of the eye and the presence of the body register fragments of the surroundings: leaves and branches forming patterns, spaces that open and close, the movement of wind through the trees. Intarsia provides a way of exploring the relationship between surface and space.

Like the gaze itself – constantly moving, registering both what is central and what lies at the periphery – the compositions allow multiple elements to exist alongside one another without establishing a clear hierarchy. The works suggest that an experience does not end in the moment of encounter, but continues to resonate afterwards, lingering in the mind, the material, the body, and the gaze.

Stitch by stitch, the works take shape through a meticulous and precise process. This methodical approach reflects an artistic practice grounded in a willingness to dwell on the small and the particular, before allowing the perspective to expand once again towards a larger whole. Attention, care, and repetition emerge as forms of response to the ecological realities of our time.

With a strong pull towards the intimate and a deep-rooted connection to the landscape, the works sustain an ongoing resonance between human and environment. This resonance takes shape through material and process, and through the gaze that observes and follows change – continuing to echo long after the initial encounter.