Lily Pad(fall) is the second of Hjort’s exhibition series of four exhibitions, one for each season.
Lily Pad is the military slang for CSL (cooperative security location). CSLs are America’s hidden military bases located in a host nation. The bases are small and contain ammunition, are often manned and prepared to fight.
In addition Lily Pad is also the name of the leaf of the water lily and the works in the exhibition series have in common that they grow where water is present and draw an invisible trail of water through the forest. Here they take up residence at another (host)work in Deep Forest Art Land and grow into a network of works, without a clear endpoint like the rhizome roots of the water lily.
Over time Hjort’s works will sneak up with a small and insistent army, which in short bursts, stands out clearly to visitors, for later to retreat again camouflaged with its surroundings.
Lily Pad(fall) has formed a base at Ann Lislegaard’s work ‘Habitat – a place dedicated to time travel and unknown events’. Habitat is a scene of asphalt that in wet condition takes on an iridescent sheen. Around and on Habitat a base of mutation-like acorn galls, luminescent piercings and daytime peacock-eye wings are sticked to knife handles which camouflage themselves by also having an iridescent sheen. The knife handles have no blade, and the function of the knife as we normally know it is gone. Left behind are the shafts as strangely mutated objects with a new kind of power, and although small, they seem unsettling in having a function that can seem opaque.
Materials: Folding knife handles, lichen, second glue, piercings, peanut flips, thistle pappus, acorn knopper galls, acorn, glow sticks, badger claws, crow claws, mole claws, gourache, dragonfly wing, cabbage butterfly wings, moth wings, blackberry thorns and rose thorns.
At the opening a network of works by Laura Hjort and the guest artists Femke Glitre and Lise Koefoed Larsen was unfolded.
Placed on trees around the Habitat scene Femke Glitre’s oil paintings with motifs of destroyed cars and reflective tape around the frames captured light from ‘Habitat’ and reflected it back towards to forest.
Hjort’s passive-aggressive objects lighted up like tiny emergency rockets or an acorn gall rave in the dewy grass and a firefly army of luminescent piercings was spotted. Meanwhile Larsen’s performance work ‘Elle’ – a ritualistic experience with sound and choreography that refers to the creatures ‘Ellefolket’ who live in the forest and seduce people with their dance and song was performed by 6 performers and plastic tubes in the twilight.