Student Work: Trine Wade ‘Hjemkomst – Returning Home’

As part of my final unit in Stage 3, I staged an exhibition of my major project. Over four weekends in January 2025 I exhibited my work in a building adjacent to my house. Entitled ‘Hjemkomst – Returning Home’, the exhibition was the curation of a project I conducted in August 2024 when I brought my grandad home to a small coastal town in Norway. Through a series of site-specific artworks, his spirit was reunited with his hometown, his ancestors and the landscape he had left behind 60 years before. The project was an exploration of place, belonging, forgiveness, memory and intergenerational trauma, themes I explored in the exhibition through photographs, printed textiles, text, installation and film. 

The exhibition was held in a disused lean-to attached to my home. I allowed the audience glimpses into my house, but only through a hole in the wall. A voyeuristic experience to illustrate the notion of being on the outside looking in, and of not quite belonging. 

This was the first time I showed the material from my project to an audience beyond my OCA peers, and I was unsure how they would respond to the personal nature of the work. I realised that people reacted to the work on many different levels. For some, it was the nature photographs that appealed the most, and we chatted about their dreams to travel to Norway to see the northern lights or the midnight sun. “It looks really beautiful”, was a comment I heard quite often. What did surprise me, was how the context of the exhibition touched people on a personal level, and how freely they shared their own experiences. It became obvious that there are many similar stories out there, of displacement, migration, and lost place-related narratives.  

I was particularly touched by one visitor’s first ever trip to India as a middle aged man. He wanted to see the places his parents grew up, but he had left it too late as everyone with connections to his family had either died or moved away. The stories and memories he had hoped to discover were lost forever. “I wish I had gone sooner, but I just wasn’t ready”, he lamented. Some people cried, particularly when watching the film. I suspect it was the singing and speaking in Norwegian, combined with my reflections of returning my grandad, that created a sense of nostalgia. “This reminds me of my mum and dad” one woman said, while another shared memories of a father singing in Irish clubs, and how his audience shed tears as they thought of the country they’d left behind. 

My grandad has been a conduit through which I have researched how displacement disrupts place connections and place knowledge, as well as the relationship between imagined and remembered history. The plan now is to create an archive of sorts that connects the past and the present, myth and memory, history and fiction. This will be a portable portfolio, an adaptable selection of my work that I’d be able to present to a range of audiences, from an academic setting to a meeting of the Women’s Institute for instance. Judging by the audience reactions, place connections and place memory is a theme many of us carry with us, often unnoticed. My exhibition provided an opportunity to talk openly about this, and I hope this archive will enable these conversations to carry on as I graduate from my Creative Arts degree later this year.