The Light that Got Lost 14

Astri Styrkestad Haukaas’ latest series is a meditation on the intersection of memory, longing, and place. Across 21 paintings, she explores the tension between the eternal and the ephemeral, capturing landscapes not as fixed locations but as emotional and psychological terrains—places shaped as much by memory as by geography. Blue dominates these works, symbolizing distance, absence, and desire. It is the color of horizons—of light scattered through air and water, always beckoning but forever out of reach. Haukaas uses this hue to evoke the intangible: the landscapes we return to in our minds, the spaces that shape us even as they remain just beyond our grasp. These paintings exist in the space between permanence and transience, presence and loss. They reflect how we carry the places and people we long for, even when they exist only in memory. In The Light That Got Lost, Haukaas invites viewers to step into this in-between world, where longing itself becomes a form of beauty—an immortal landscape of the heart. In Styrkestad Haukass's Words: The works are rooted in the idea that space is a physical location, while place is the cultural and emotional meaning we assign to it. I always want to explore how landscapes act as both external and internal phenomena. These places, whether real or imagined, carry the weight of memory and longing. They are where we return to again and again, even as they remain out of reach—immortal in their ability to persist in our mortal minds.