Artist Residency – Creating for the exhibition "And the Wind Will Take Us Away" for Stasys Museum

Solveig Settemsdal is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Norway. Working across sculpture, drawing, video, and sound, her practice explores the intersections of nature, technology, and human cognition. Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe and the United States, and in 2016 she was awarded first prize in the Jerwood Drawing Prize for her video work Singularity.

During the residency, Solveig Settemsdal developed Sunken Ship, exploring themes of impermanence, transformation, and natural processes. Working with water, salt, clay, seaweed, and glass, she experimented with creating ship-like forms in which the materials themselves became active agents of change. The development process focused on observing material behaviour and interactions, examining how time and environmental forces shape and gradually transform human-made structures.

From the artist:
"May 2025. My first visit to Lithuania was an intense, incredible week — staying in a little tower in the forest at Pragiedruliai while working on an installation for the Stasys Museum.
I set up in one of the residency studios, building a shipwreck in unfired clay, to be sunk into water for the exhibition And the Wind Will Take Us Away. The sculpture is based on 3D scans of a Greek merchant ship from around 400 BC, found at 2,000 metres depth in the Black Sea — a remake of a work I first made during Covid, in 2021.
Because the clay is unfired, it's fragile and highly sensitive to movement and temperature; if it dries out too much, it will disintegrate the moment it's submerged. I had brilliant helpers who drove, carried, and installed it with such care — we all felt every bump in the road on the short drive through Panevėžys to the install."

https://settemsdal.com/shipwreck
https://settemsdal.com/and-the-wind-will-take-us-away