Følstad and Ness’s collaborative exhibition brings together two distinct geographies – the remote landscape of Finnmark where they quarry stone, and the storied, urban setting of London, where the exhibition is being held. Situated in Kautokeino, the quarry lies well inside the arctic circle, a place of contrasts between night and day where, at the winter solstice the sun never rises, while at the height of summer it never sets. The site is only accessible during the brief summer months and is occupied by herds of reindeer for the remainder of the year. The stone extracted there is Masi Quartzite, a 1.5-billion-year-old metamorphic rock. Its structure shows a complex wavy pattern of different green colours that recall the Northern Lights, one of the most extraordinary natural spectacles. The colours of the Aurora Borealis result from interactions between charged particles from the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere.

References to Land Art abound throughout the exhibition as the artists borrow Robert Smithson’s term ‘Nonsite’ as a surtitle to the work Fluid Mountain, an installation of stainless-steel basins filled with Masi Quartzite stone-flour with Arctic water from inside the Mountain at the quarry and mixed into a set paste which emulates the patterns of the cut rockface. The drawings Noetic Structure SE8 and Metis (Gnomonic growth) and the sculpture Metis Mock-up explore the geometry and features of the gallery. Outside, Metis Garden is a sculpture of 960 black bricks that bisects the large greenhouse that occupies the gallery’s walled yard.

Smithson’s key ideas from the 1960s about the relationship between large-scale interventions in remote landscapes and their representation in gallery spaces remain fertile in the present day where digital technologies are able to replicate conditions that abolish location and distance. Contrariwise, Følstad and Ness make works that resist the erasure of place and compression of time; they argue for an art that foregrounds ideas embedded in sensation, presenting matter as something active and vibrant that requires the embodied presence of the spectator. Artworks then cease to be static objects and are revealed as artistic actions that reference the event-based nature of the world. The term ‘Metis’ is derived from Native American ideas about the land which rely on the know-how of practice and lived experience. Knowledge can be said to be a form of memory, which constantly reshapes one’s position in relation to events.

Accordingly, the exhibition links 222T, the artists’ own itinerant gallery space in Oslo, Consultório project room in Chamusca, Portugal, and SE8 Gallery – each space drawing a different response from the artists and leading to the production and installation of new works.

A publication for Mulberry Tree Press that reflects on these nomadic practices is currently in preparation and will be launched in early 2026 at SE8.