“I’ve always been fascinated by emotion and by how we connect with each other. What’s happening when we talk to or meet each other? Often, we meet ourselves in a moment or place in life and something happens inside us.”

Hanne M. Biedilæ is a visual artist, painter, and ceramicist with a highly philosophical approach to her art. Her richly coloured, tactile, sensuous work plays with and explores the ideas of social consciousness, the encounter with the other, and the ways that emotion mediates our relationships with ourselves and with nature.

Yet, there’s one theme that comes up again and again. “The main concept I approach in my work is the feminine universe, and the surrounding assumptions of eternal femininity, youth, and the feminine as object,” Hanne tells us. As a result, women figures appear across Hanne’s oeuvre, in her ceramics and her paintings, where they seem to emerge from expressive landscapes.

Hanne studied ceramics in Denmark in her twenties and later worked in and managed galleries for a decade while part of Fredrikstad’s Bastion 5 Arts and Crafts Centre. Yet, as she explains, the pressures of commercial art became a little too much. “I started to feel sick with the idea of having to make yet another red plate!” she laughs. “I felt an artist needs to be true to themselves and be as honest as they can. At that moment, it was right for me to develop in a different direction.”

Since 2016, Hanne has been working in her studio in Fredrikstad, her hometown an hour south of Oslo. Helped by further study in visual art, there she has found some stability and freedom. “I’m finding the voice that expresses what’s meaningful for me. If someone else likes it, that’s great—but that’s not the most important thing anymore.”

With this new approach, things are going well. “Ideas are popping into my head all the time!” Hanne says. “Sometimes I struggle to accept my own style or my approach to colour and technique. But ultimately I always love that struggle.”

When we speak, Hanne is preparing for an exhibition in Milan and has just been invited to be featured in a book of contemporary European art, which will be on sale in galleries across the continent. Meanwhile, a gallery in Madrid has reached out too, asking to represent her and to exhibit her work in upcoming exhibitions.

“It will be a great opportunity to reach a wider audience,” Hanne says. “Ultimately, I don’t want to tell people my opinions, but capture ideas and present them. That way, people can engage with those ideas and make up their own mind about them.”