Nimble Weavers Exhibition

How is the value of our surroundings affected by a landscape under continuous change? What role and agency do local inhabitants feel they have? How do we negotiate conflicting values ​​of nature and belonging within modern energy landscapes?

These are central questions in Ase Brunborg Lie's exhibition Nimble Weavers (external link).

Nimble Weavers is a one-year interdisciplinary collaboration with artist Ase Brunborg Lie and the NFR-project ACTIONABLE at the University of Bergen (UiB) led by Alicia Donnellan Barraclough (external link). Through research and workshops conducted in the Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, they have focused on energy infrastructure, land-use conflicts, and local engagement. A Biosphere Reserve is a UNESCO designation for a region with high biological and cultural diversity, demonstrating a balanced relationship between people and nature. They can act as learning sites for sustainable development, testing approaches to social and ecological change.

Over the past year, the artist has worked alongside UiB  doctoral student Janne Thomsen, part of the ACTIONABLE team, travelling around the Biosphere Reserve, where Thomsen interviewed landowners, local residents, interest groups, industry, municipalities and state administrators about natural values, spatial planning and (local) agency. Brunborg Lie has also, in collaboration with Thomsen, held several workshops in the Biosphere Reserve in collaboration with local libraries and hiking groups, with silent listening walks, drawing exercises and discussions around points of conflict, both potential and actual.

Through collaboration, workshops with locals, and field-based research, Brunborg Lie works to formulate situated knowledge about the landscape and our relationship to it through sensing, mapping, and story-telling of what may be abstract or inaccessible. 

The exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre (HKS) consists of, among other things, a video piece that reflects on the Biosphere Reserve and what it can mean to live sustainably, with all the challenges and compromises this entails.

On the walls of the exhibition space hang large textile works featuring excerpts from drawings and reflections from participants in the listening walks. These fragments form a value and impression map of Nordhordland and the Biosphere Reserve, rooted in the people who live there. The textile is embroidered with local sheep's wool and dyed with plants and mushrooms gathered in the Nordhordland region by local textile artist and weaver Anne Grethe Breisnes. The textile is embroidered by Brunborg Lie and local embroiderer Anne Iren Hjelmeland.

After the exhibition period, the works will move on to Den Grøne Fabrikken (external link), run by Osterøy Kunstlag. Listening walk workshops will also be held there. Osterøy is part of the Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

In September 2025 and March 2026, Brunborg Lie, Thomsen and coordinator Robin Everett hosted Kitchen Dinner Events at HKS. A final Kitchen Dinner will take place on 26 May 2026 with presentations by Alicia Donnellan Barraclough, Robin Everett, and Nordhordland UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and locally sourced and foraged food prepared by chef Anne Lill Stene.