Hanne Skjold Knudsen is a multidisciplinary artist, working from a micro-phenomenological and listening-based approach, often shifting focus between investigations of spirituality, interconnectedness, care, and the entanglement of inner and outer nature.

Skjold Knudsen acknowledges that different media articulate knowledge of the world in distinct ways, both corporeal and intellectual. The works evolve when she manages to be present enough to evoke an essence in a material, in the encounter between materials, or in the interplay with others. This insistence on presence as a method is, in a way, political, as it carries within it a resistance to systemic forms of acceleration and an insistence on sensed responses to the world; a form of aesthetic truth.

With this, Skjold Knudsen explores possibilities for creating openings for the unexpected, the heart, and listening. In short, to be co-creators of space for more femininely coded forces and experiences of kinship with all living things. Her focus oscillates between themes such as time, loss, connectedness, compassion, and the relationship between inner and outer nature.
In this approach, the unwilled must have space. Thus, Skjold Knudsen must let go of control and listen into the unexpected, the uncontrollable, and the immediate…in order to hear what the material itself wants to say, and to give what the work springs from trust and space. She is convinced that opening up to the unexpected offers an opportunity for the world to open up just a tiny bit, revealing its kinship with everything else in small, almost invisible glimpses.

“It is first and foremost the small events, almost invisible in time, that make up the difference between everything and nothing”.
Jón Kalman Stefánsson, The Heart of Man