Lorie Ballage

Velkommen til utstillingen Sink & Soap med Lorie Ballage, 15. oktober – 16. november 2025

In Sink & Soap, Lorie Ballage transforms the intimate space of the bathroom into a site of reflection. What is usually private, habitual, and invisible becomes a terrain where gestures of care and introspection unfold into quiet acts of resistance. Through a multi-sensory installation, she invites visitors to inhabit a space where the boundaries between function and fiction, body and object, gradually dissolve.

For this exhibition at Buskerud Kunstsenter, Ballage develops her ongoing Bath Time series into a landscape of dissolution. New collaborations with artisans in glass, textiles and tufting, extend the work’s material language, allowing everyday objects to appear caught in an uncanny reverie. Glass surfaces catch the light like watery ripples, while plastic echoes the traces that water leaves behind. Tufted puddle-like carpets bring us back to the soft sensations found in the comfort of our own privacy while ceramic showerheads hang like wilted flowers and pipes loop into impossible systems.  

What distinguishes this exhibition is its emphasis on interconnectedness and resourcefulness. Works from earlier iterations are reconfigured, upcycled, and allowed to evolve, creating an ecosystem of shifting forms rather than fixed objects.

Ballage’s practice emerges from a deep engagement with water as both a physical element and a metaphor for fluidity in human experience. Here, she brings that exploration home, closer to the body, where matter and sensation intertwine. A faint fragrance of soap rises gently and somewhere, whispers escape from invisible mouths. Each piece seems to breathe on its own, yet together they form a living organism of sound, scent, and matter.

Sink & Soap invites us to linger between the self we recognize and the one that slips away, between object and gesture, stillness and flow. Here, water exists in its absence, inviting us to let go, to dissolve, and to feel what remains.

Born in Paris and based in Bergen, Norway, Lorie Ballage (b. 1994) holds an MFA from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and a BFA from the Art Academy of Dundee. She has exhibited at, among others, Pragovka Gallery (Prague), Kunstnernes Hus, Carl Berner Projektrom (Oslo), Bergen Kunsthall, Kunstgarasjen, KRAFT (Bergen), Studio 17 (Stavanger), and the Mark Rothko Art Center in Latvia. She is based in Bergen, Norway. 

In 2026, Lorie Ballage will present her work at the Ceramic Brussels International Art Fair in Belgium and take part in a residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, supported by Norwegian Crafts.

This exhibition has been made possible with support from the Regional Project Funds for Visual Arts (KiN) and the Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.

Utstillingsåpning 15. oktober kl. 18.