Festival Artist 2011- Gjertrud Hals.

Gjertrud Hals (b. 1948) comes from Finnøy, a tiny island in Sandøy municipality on the Romsdal coastline, a fact which Gjertrud says has had a strong influence on her work. She trained at the National Teachers College for Arts and Crafts, Notodden and Oslo. She was also a guest student at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. Gjertrud Hals trained as a weaver, but for the past twenty years or so she has focused on freestanding sculptures using different fibre as well as non-fibre materials. She likes the fact that she can be creative in the way she wants to be, use the materials she prefers and that she can be serious and meditative one day and playful the next.

Gjertrud has participated in a number of group and joint exhibitions in Norway and, not least, abroad. She has exhibited several times at the National Annual Autumn Exhibition and regional exhibitions as well as in the USA, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Belgium and Poland. She has had eight solo exhibitions since 1985. Gjertrud has also undertaken several public commissions, including the Nord-Heggdal chapel, Draugen and Brage oil platforms, Molde District College and Molde Stadium. Gjertrud’s works have been acquired by public and private collectors in Europe, the USA and Japan, including the Arts Council Norway (1982, 1984, 1988 and 1988), the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Leopold Hoesh Museum in Germany, the American Craft Museum in New York, and Musées des Arts Décoratifs in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The exhibition at Kunstnersenteret Møre & Romsdal will comprise various installations and sculptures and will fill all the rooms at the centre. Work on the exhibition is already underway, and will be inspired by the transition between nature and culture. It will deal with organic forms and abstract, simple forms, and with the traces left by a lived life, of the past. It will also be about modern man's place in nature, where organic structures create ties to human forms.