(colloquially: The plate)
When the school shines and the heat of the rays is captured by the gray slate surfaces in the flat hollow that forms Stillested 2, both people and sheep know where it is good to be. And if it rains, the rainwater collects in a small lake at the bottom of the hollow – ready to reflect the sun when it reappears. Or to quench the thirst of the park's flock of sheep.
Here you can 'enjoy yourself', as the Norwegian artist Britt Smelvær would say.
She is Norwegian, even though Britt Smelvær has lived in Denmark all her adult life - partly in an apartment in Copenhagen, partly in a house on Langeland, where the green lawn of the garden almost blends in with the Langeland Belt, which a little further north becomes the Great Belt.
Sitting on slate stone - both in hot sun and in winter - to sit and be happy and "small in the great nature", as she says, is the element she has brought with her from her homeland.
The thirteen tons of slate that form Stillested 2 are from Otta Skifer in Gudbrandsdalen and shipped to TICKON. A bit against the principles of site-specific art, but according to Britt Smelvær, it is also about taking something, a gift, with you from home when you change countries.
Artist: Britt Smelvær / See more of Smelvær's work here.
Year: 2002
Britt Smelvær is Norwegian, but born in Scotland in 1945. She graduated from the Norwegian State Teachers College in Design in Oslo, and then became a professor at Bergen Art College. She has always experimented with natural materials and has enriched Denmark, Norway, Great Britain and Indonesia with large art projects.