Drawing unfolds beyond the page—merging with sculpture, space, and mixed media to dissolve the boundaries between line and form.
Projects Expanding the Drawing Format
This page presents a selection of works in which Hanne Væringsaasen extends drawing beyond its traditional two-dimensional framework. Here, drawing becomes both concept and structure, merging with sculptural elements, installation, video, and mixed media. By shifting between planes, objects, and spatial interventions, these projects dissolve the boundary between line and form, opening new ways of experiencing drawing as a physical and conceptual presence.
«The Potential of Rejected Ideas»
«The Potential of Rejected Ideas» was an artistic endeavor realized as a drawn sculptural installation, comprising ten meters of crumpled drawing paper. By foregrounding the conceptual value of so-called ‘failed’ or ‘discarded’ ideas, the project interrogated the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. Through its fusion of drawing and sculptural practices, it challenged conventional interpretations of the medium and illuminated the transformative potential inherent in artistic processes.
Set against a cultural backdrop that often dismisses concepts deemed initially unviable, the project underscored the significance of revisiting, recontextualizing, and revitalizing previously discarded notions. By doing so, it advocated a methodological approach that embraces experimentation, risk, and failure as integral to innovation. «The Potential of Rejected Ideas» thereby positioned itself within a broader discourse on art’s capacity to reveal latent creative possibilities, emphasizing how the renegotiation of the threshold between rejection and renewal can foster new insights and developments, both within the arts and in societal innovation processes more broadly.
Various Art Projects
In Hanne Væringsaasen’s mixed-media and video-based works, drawing acts as a connective thread—structuring materials, bridging techniques, and expanding into tactile and digital realms. Lines become spatial, temporal, and narrative forces, shaping both form and meaning across multiple layers of experience.
Artistic intervention of a building in Oslo, Norway:
Are You Receiving This Message? (2013) is an audio-visual work by Hanne Væringsaasen, created as part of a curated artistic intervention involving the building that houses Café Drama. Her contribution was projected onto one of the café’s interior walls, while the work’s title appeared in the building’s windows, engaging directly with the surrounding outdoor space. Composed and animated across 58 layers, the piece integrates photography, hand drawing, digital drawing, video, text, and audio—every element produced by the artist. It reflects on how emerging technologies reshape communication, altering human interaction and exposing us to involuntary and often uncomfortable forms of visibility.
Audio-visual work – Duration: 3 minutes
Set against the fleeting chatter of digital-age banter, the dialogue unfolds in quick, overlapping bursts. Humour, suspicion, and awkwardness mix as the figures navigate being watched—mirroring the uneasy intimacy of modern surveillance.
The speech bubbles in this work are in Norwegian.
For English-speaking viewers, here is the translation:
- What’s up with the dude behind us? He’s staring at us!
- LOL, WTF
- I know, right! OMG
- Wait, is he filming us?
- Awkward! What are we gonna do?
- I dunno, act natural?
- ROFL, sure!
- LMAO, we’re just gonna chill, then?
- Yeah
Video/ Multimedia Art
2012-2014
Hanne Væringsaasen’s media art videos integrate elements of video, drawing, photography, sound, text, and performance, exploring facets of identity, intimacy, and distance. Her artistic research reflects on the technological age and the behavioural changes shaped by visual culture and the high consumption of images—changes most evident in how people communicate with one another. She also considers the phenomenological dimensions of contemporary communication technologies, viewing them as sensuous extensions of the body through which we perceive and experience others.
Hanne Væringsaasen’s artistic alter ego, The Psychonaut, frequently appears in her multimedia video works, where drawing plays a significant role in the layered visual language. Conceived as a figure navigating the unconscious mind, he persistently seeks to understand the ways in which people communicate—often with varying degrees of success. The term psychonaut, meaning “sailor of the soul,” refers to one who studies and explores consciousness, including altered and unconscious states, grounded in the understanding that to study consciousness is also to transform it.
«The Psychonauts tentative travel in the communication realm»
The Psychonaut’s Tentative Travel in the Communication Realm (2014) is a 10-minute media art / audio-visual work by Hanne Væringsaasen. The video interprets her alter ego The Psychonaut’s journey and his examination of various attempts at communication. The work formed part of her thesis on different communication interstices and her broader art-based research.
«Screen Flicker»
Screen Flicker (2015) is a one-minute audio-visual work by Hanne Væringsaasen. The piece offers an artistic interpretation of screen addiction, reflecting on how new technological possibilities fuel a craving for constant news updates, leaving viewers in a detached and fragmented state.
Artistic research
As part of a broader arts-based research inquiry, these two media art videos each integrate video, drawing, photography, and performance. In both works, drawing operates as a central visual and conceptual thread, merging with other media languages to articulate complex narratives. Together, they challenge the boundaries between static image, moving image, and embodied action. Duration: 2 minutes each.
Techniques: Video, drawing, photography and performance elements. Duration 2 minutes.
Techniques: Video, drawing, photography and performance elements. Duration 2 minutes.
Mixed Media
In her mixed-media print works, Hanne Væringsaasen weaves together photography, drawing, and new media—each element born from her own hand. Photographs merge with hand-drawn or digitally rendered lines, layered at times with washes of watercolour or fragments of painted surfaces. Through this transformative process, each work becomes a singular imprint of form and feeling.
The artworks speak of the dual nature of contemporary life, where the geometry of the city meets the contours of nature, and hidden emotional currents rise to the surface like whispers beneath the visible.
