The exhibition Oil nebula, rise uses the concept of the abyss, the vast cosmic sea as described in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) which separates earth from hell, as a metaphor for societal collapse. The project draws parallels to the jellification of the oceans, where ecosystems are changing and new organisms thrive. Inspired by the increasing prevalence of invasive species and environmental changes, the exhibition consisting of works in ceramics, glass, wood and aluminium strives to mythologize the defamiliarized earth. The works form a visual language which speaks about the future of the oceans and humanity whilst forming the inhospitable sea of the abyss itself. Like Milton’s abyss, simultaneously described as the worlds cradle and it's grave, the exhibition becomes an ouroboros focusing on both the perils and prospects of the future.

Flash fiction written for the exhibition by Anthea Buys:

The Room

On the seventh of fourteen sweaty nights – the heatwave was unrelenting – I found the room you’re standing in now. It wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t full either. Eight objects lay on the floor in the dark. It was my job to find one of them, although I didn’t know which.

The room, as you know, is in the basement of what might have been the town’s hospital. Like the churches and the grocery stores, hospitals belonged to a bygone time, a time out of joint with the present we know.

On the first and second floors rows of metal bed frames still line the halls. The later hospitals all favoured this layout, itself a revival of the field hospitals of the twentieth century’s great wars, because by that time the notion of contagion was largely irrelevant. Everyone was already sick. Everyone had made everyone else sick. They – the doctors, the politicians, the people –  had just begun to accept that bespoke medical attention was an outdated, even fanciful notion.

Today these halls are materially homogenous, braids of concrete, metal and plastic. The mattresses and bedding belonging to the rows of beds have long since vanished. Every few beds there is a tree-like metal stand whose hooks sometimes have empty plastic sacks hanging from them. Tiny needles lie in clusters where the floor meets the walls as if swept there, perhaps at the time that the landfills were declared full, which was about the same time as the incineration of medical waste was banned.

The higher floors of the building are inaccessible. The elevator shafts are filled with debris up to the first and sometimes even the second floor, and the entrances to the flights of stairs have been bricked shut.

The basement has the same footprint as the first and second floors, but a much lower ceiling. If you jump you should be able to touch it with no difficulty. The room is engulfed by complete and palpable darkness, darkness of the sort your eyes simply can’t tolerate, blindness. To find the objects I had to crawl on my hands and knees, although I first encountered one by bumping into it. The objects were interspersed in the environment and seem placed rather than strewn. They were all hard and cold to the touch, round in some parts, sharp in others, maybe delicate – it’s impossible to say.

When you really want to find an object you have to look with your eyes closed. So the darkness of the room was not an impediment to my search. On the contrary, it forced me to circumnavigate the visual instinct and reach instead for something postural, latent in the body, a secret communication from vessel to vessel.

After the night that I found the room, I returned to it four times, each on a separate night, each night seemingly hotter and longer than the night before. Each time I thought I came closer to finding the object, but the heat and the thickness of the air brought on in me an overwhelming fatigue and I had to stop before sunrise. By the fourth night, my body had become a fluent reader of the text of the room, and it knew with some confidence the distances between objects, their textures and volumes. But on that night, my body found the room empty. I crawled across the breadth of the room, snaking my way back and forth, and wherever an object had been there was nothing but a small cloud of cold air and a dampness on the ground.  

I left perplexed. Perhaps I had simply run out of time. The heatwave ran its course and I didn’t return to the room.

Flash fiction written for the exhibition by Anthea Buys:

The Room

On the seventh of fourteen sweaty nights – the heatwave was unrelenting – I found the room you’re standing in now. It wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t full either. Eight objects lay on the floor in the dark. It was my job to find one of them, although I didn’t know which.

The room, as you know, is in the basement of what might have been the town’s hospital. Like the churches and the grocery stores, hospitals belonged to a bygone time, a time out of joint with the present we know.

On the first and second floors rows of metal bed frames still line the halls. The later hospitals all favoured this layout, itself a revival of the field hospitals of the twentieth century’s great wars, because by that time the notion of contagion was largely irrelevant. Everyone was already sick. Everyone had made everyone else sick. They – the doctors, the politicians, the people –  had just begun to accept that bespoke medical attention was an outdated, even fanciful notion.

Today these halls are materially homogenous, braids of concrete, metal and plastic. The mattresses and bedding belonging to the rows of beds have long since vanished. Every few beds there is a tree-like metal stand whose hooks sometimes have empty plastic sacks hanging from them. Tiny needles lie in clusters where the floor meets the walls as if swept there, perhaps at the time that the landfills were declared full, which was about the same time as the incineration of medical waste was banned.

The higher floors of the building are inaccessible. The elevator shafts are filled with debris up to the first and sometimes even the second floor, and the entrances to the flights of stairs have been bricked shut.

The basement has the same footprint as the first and second floors, but a much lower ceiling. If you jump you should be able to touch it with no difficulty. The room is engulfed by complete and palpable darkness, darkness of the sort your eyes simply can’t tolerate, blindness. To find the objects I had to crawl on my hands and knees, although I first encountered one by bumping into it. The objects were interspersed in the environment and seem placed rather than strewn. They were all hard and cold to the touch, round in some parts, sharp in others, maybe delicate – it’s impossible to say.

When you really want to find an object you have to look with your eyes closed. So the darkness of the room was not an impediment to my search. On the contrary, it forced me to circumnavigate the visual instinct and reach instead for something postural, latent in the body, a secret communication from vessel to vessel.

After the night that I found the room, I returned to it four times, each on a separate night, each night seemingly hotter and longer than the night before. Each time I thought I came closer to finding the object, but the heat and the thickness of the air brought on in me an overwhelming fatigue and I had to stop before sunrise. By the fourth night, my body had become a fluent reader of the text of the room, and it knew with some confidence the distances between objects, their textures and volumes. But on that night, my body found the room empty. I crawled across the breadth of the room, snaking my way back and forth, and wherever an object had been there was nothing but a small cloud of cold air and a dampness on the ground.  

I left perplexed. Perhaps I had simply run out of time. The heatwave ran its course and I didn’t return to the room.

A spine, of sorts, made of ceramics; a glistening, colourful intestine like shape made of glass; a stomach? A heart? A leg. An arm. Linda Morell’s universe is filled with objects that are reminiscent of something human, something bodily. Yet, it is as if the human is disturbingly absent. The organ like objects lay scattered, amputated. Some of them seem to be morphing into something else entirely, and gaining new functionality. Several of them are placed on small tables that evoke associations to something from an operating room, but with submerged bowl like table tops, as if their purpose is to collect the fluids from something that is leaking. The bodies in this room are synthetic and deconstructed. They might resemble prostheses, anatomical models, or parts for a robot. So, who is it meant for, the healing fluid that runs from the cut aloe vera leaves? Who is the intended user of the draped textile that hangs on a rack on the wall? Are the dried plants in the large leg shaped urn, placed against the wall, meant to provide a relaxing atmosphere for someone? If so, what is the meaning of the sharp metal that conjures such painful associations? The sculptures relate to the human body and suggest something healing and caring, while also brutally repelling us.

The brushed steel, the glass and the glazed ceramic surfaces glisten. We have all become used to the clinical and the clean over the past year. Surfaces are continuously being disinfected. Avoiding contamination has become a part of every day life; like a reflex. Morell takes her inspiration from a past long before the covid pandemic. The health temples of ancient Greece, where science and spirituality went hand in hand, has been her staring point for investigating our current relationship to the body and to health. And just as much as glistening, spotless surfaces Morells works deals with what is inside. With the body, with containers, and with the body as a container.

Humourism has its origin in the Greek nature philosophers, and their idea that everything has its origin in the four basic elements of fire, earth, air and water. In the human body, the four elements were represented by the liver, the spleen, the heart and the brain, and the theory was that these four organs in turn discharged the liquids yellow bile, black bile, blood and slime. The idea was that these liquids had to be in balance in order for Man to maintain good health. Too much or lack of one of them tantamount to illness. The body was like a vessel for these four elements, where the landscape within alternated between suffering from drought, cold, heat and moistness. A thing of the past, one might think. Yet Morell has studied how elements from these ancient ideas about the body has lived on alongside modern medical science, and how they intertwine with it in order to create new myths of the optimized body. 

“Such as the food is, such is the blood: and such as the blood is, such is the flesh,” wrote Thomas Coghan in the book The Haven of Health in 1584. At this time, humourism permeated medicine. Yet even today, the saying “you are what you eat” is a fairly uncontroversial one. As of the 2000s, detox became a common practice in order to cleanse ones body of inner poisons. The human body was yet again a vessel; an object with vague functions that one attempted to gain control over, shape and construct. The pandemic that hit us on a global scale in 2020 has again proved how inaccessible bodily functions can be to us. In spite of medical research on a grand scale, there is still a lot we do not know. We do not always know who is infected, how sick we may get, nor if or how we regain full health. The ambiguity in Morell’s objects can be read as a timeless expression for the inaccessible and the uncertainties related to the body and its functions.

– Torill Østby Haaland