Eating at Conjunction

"Eating at Conjunction consists of a series of five sculptures mounted on top of concrete pedestals, with titles referencing a specific park and its cultural function. In a way Hestvold is inquiring into what a park contains, and how it is inevitably linked to eating. It was during an artist residence in Berlin in 2019, when Hestvold developed an interest in the disposition of parks and landscape design. The result of this interest emerges as a search for the historical, cultural and material formations and infrastructures of parks. Fundamentally, her works seem to explore the nature off parks, their history and materiality, as containers in their own right.

The sculptures in Eating at Conjunction represent generic food containers, or more concretely, take away boxes and they embody maps of the park they are referencing. They are cast in a mix of Ganoderma, a living fungi that functions as the binder, and hemp shavings which is the material’s aggregate. Unlike concrete which is also a composite (consisting of aggregate and a binder fluid) that cures in order to harden, the matrix forming the walls of Hestvold`s sculptures harden because the Ganoderma eats away at the hemp shavings. Technically speaking, the material is stabilised by making the Ganoderma inactive. Like yeast, certain temperatures or lack of humidity will cause a sort of hibernation, resulting in a quasi-stable mass; the walls of these sculptures can be “awakened” at any time."

- excerpt from Eating at Conjunction, text by: Malin Graesse