Into the Reeds
A Dialogue Between Material, Craft, and Space
Where does the boundary lie between sculpture and architecture, object and space, craft and architecture?
Into the Reeds is a site-specific installation rooted in a bodily experience of the landscape: moving through a reed bed. Rather than reproducing the landscape, the work translates this experience through material, form and sound.
The work is constructed from hand-harvested reeds, stripped of their leaves, woven and bound into three-dimensional forms. Each element emerges through a dialogue between the inherent qualities of the material and the artist’s sculptural intentions. The techniques draw on traditions of working with natural materials, including broom-making and basketry.
The project grows out of a long-term investigation into natural and seemingly simple or primitive materials and their architectural and sculptural potential. Reeds are a familiar material in the Nordic landscape, with a long history of use in construction. Here, they are taken from their familiar context and transformed through the human hand into a large-scale work of craft, situated between sculpture and architecture.
Individual reeds are selected, shaped, gathered into modules and bound together, creating rhythm and structural logic. Their natural rigidity allows for lightweight, self-supporting constructions based on curved surfaces and tent-like geometries. Yet the irregularity, fragility and natural variation of the material remain part of the work.
The project also draws on the childhood instinct to make dens, hiding places and temporary shelters from what the landscape provides. These memories meet with traditional forms of making, bringing together something instinctive and something carefully crafted.
Into the Reeds is both a translation and a transformation: a spatial experience found in the landscape is taken into the hand and transformed through craft into a constructed environment.
Date / 2026
Photo / Ida Tinning
Location / Til:værks, Copenhagen
