About the Work

PETROGLYPHS is a process-based installation developed through mapping, suspension, and repeated alignment. The work takes prehistoric rock carvings on Bornholm as a structural point of reference, treating them as systems of registration rather than images or symbols.

Instead of reproducing existing petroglyph groupings, the work relocates their logic to a contemporary ground. A mapped field of the town of Vang is reconfigured into a constructed constellation in which individual points are held in relation through distance and interval rather than resemblance.

A one-metre wooden drawing compass is suspended from the ceiling by a dense accumulation of red thread, directing its axis toward the mapped surface below. Thread functions as both connective and obstructive material, establishing continuity while maintaining tension and drag. Repetition replaces depiction; alignment remains provisional.

The installation sustains a relation between proximity and distance, ground and suspension, present and residual time. Meaning is withheld from cosmology and relocated to procedure, duration, and the maintenance of an unstable correspondence.

© Camilla Howalt