Based on an interdisciplinary study of the seven noble gases and their special qualities, Nat Bloch Gregersen has created new works in the media light, textile, sculpture and text. The presence of the elements in the earth beneath us, in the air we breathe, and in the universe, constitutes the focal point of the cross-media exhibition. The noble gases Helium, Argon, Neon, Xenon, Krypton, Radon and Oganesson are invisible to the naked eye, but through her works Bloch Gregersen gives the intangible substances a poetic and material body that touch the viewer and create interweaving spaces between the physical and non-physical. 

 

In the exhibition, each work or series of works represent one or more of the seven noble gases. The slender works of light that snuggle around themselves according to Bloch Gregersen's hand-drawn lines are made not only with Neon, but also with the three rare gases Helium, Xenon and Krypton. Encountering the electric current, the intangible light makes visible the otherwise invisible gases, which are expressed in the gases' own characteristic colors and appearances as monochrome sculptural elements in space. In a fluctuating manner, Bloch Gregersen plays with the perception between the figurative and the abstract. The works of light abstractly resemble words that, through repetition, become a language in themselves. As a kind of light-calligraphy, they formulate an alternative language beyond concrete words - a material narrative.

 

The semi-transparent textile works pose with motifs from outer space; an interstellar cloud of dust and gas where a rare argon hybrid has been detected due to the camera technology of space probes. Like a veil or a lens through which one can view the rest of the exhibition, they remind us that what one looks at is affected by what one sees through.

 

Further Bloch Gregersen has written a textual contribution for the exhibition which both functions as a work in itself and as a contextualizing layer enveloping the other works. The text touches on the subject of the exhibition from a different poetic angle than the physical works. In this, Bloch Gregersen uses the concrete language to imagine an abstract and emotional experience on the basis of scientifically based facts about the universe and the noble gases. The literary text work will be published at the end of the exhibition period and thus becomes a continuous actor as a communicator of the exhibition and its themes in its afterlife as a book.

 

The noble gases tell a story of existence, the fleeting and the fixed, the past and the future. Through a visualization of the gases in different materialities, a flickering narrative emerges across science, materiality and language. In the encounter between the viewer's body, the intangible and the invisible a pause arises, a frozen moment, a common now?

 

Nat Bloch Gregersen (b. 1986, Denmark) graduated from the Jutland Art Academy in 2015. She works with installation, sculpture, text and reading. Bloch Gregersen has exhibited at Interdimensionale 2 at Gammelgaard, Rønnebæksholm, Haverkampf Gallery in Berlin, Kunsthal Aarhus Skulpturpark 2017, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning 2018 and is participating, as one of 8 selected Danish artists, at the international biennial of contemporary art - JCE biennial 2019-2021, in which she won the special award 'PRIX SPÉCIAL «IN EXTENSO - ARTISTE EN RÉSIDENCE»'. She has created a large-scale public decoration for the Court House in Lyngby in 2020. Bloch Gregersen's works is to be found in the collection of the Danish Arts Foundation.