HILO-project//Obrestad/Dølheim

HILO-Project is a Norwegian artist duo founded by Hilde Iren Dølheim and Linn Obrestad. Based in Telemark, Norway, we have collaborated since 2017, creating works that span a diverse range of media and approaches. Our practice is rooted in re-contextualization: we explore how objects take on new meanings when they are shifted out of their familiar contexts, reframed, or disassembled. Our work is cross-disciplinary, merging elements of installation, sculpture, and environmental art, and is deeply intertwined with the natural world, highlighting the tension and dialogue between human and non-human landscapes.

Each HILO- project is an invitation to slow down and reconsider our relationship with the physical world, its histories, ecologies, and vulnerabilities.

Extractions is an artistic exploration of the impacts of industrial extraction on ecosystems, communities, and the values that bind us to the natural world. In a society that systematically prioritises short-term profit over long-term sustainability, we expand our gaze from a local mining project at Fensfeltet, Norway, to the global forces driving exploitation and degradation. The project is our response to the troubling reality of a worldview that reduces all life, human, animal, entire ecosystems, to mere resources within an ever-expanding economy.
Metal meets wood, and words emerge: etched into the very fabric of the forest. They speak of an impending mining project, which threatens to transform this place into a toxic wasteland. They speak of progress and its cost - the insatiable hunger for resources. They whisper, gentle imprints, an invitation to tread lightly upon the land.
“Rock, Paper, Scissors”, art project that explores aspects of knowledge and meaning. The project is inspired by the game rock-paper-scissors, where two players simultaneously form one of three shapes with their hands.
The game is a metaphor for the project’s exploration of the interplay and conflicts between different media, materials, and forms of knowledge. The game/play metaphor also reflects the project’s playful and experimental approach to art creation, and how elements of chance and unpredictability are involved in creative processes.
The number 42, which according to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, is used as a unifying element that ties together twigs, stones, pictures, film, and books into a whole.
Ongoing land art project in the Telemark forests
On site investigations and out-door exhibition on the small island of Langøya, Telemark and a follow up exhibition in Galleri Pop in Langesund based on our stay on the island.
Big issues seen though the lens of the everyday, mixed media installation works
Mixed media installation works
Link to documentation video

Extractions (2024)

In pursuit of economic gain, both nature and humanity are sacrificed.

Through installations that intertwine natural materials, industrial elements, and visual symbolism, Extractions invites viewers into the complex narrative of both loss and resistance. Roots mounted in steel frames, copper flowers on wood, and fragments of forest ecosystems are transformed into symbols of connection and separation, resilience and vulnerability. Each work is meant as a layered conversation, where opposing ideas and emotions exist side by side, resisting the simplifications of language.

What happens to our collective values when what cannot be sold is deemed worthless? And what do we lose when nature is no longer seen as a living world but as a depleted bank of resources? In Extractions, we look at the consequences of a culture that undermines the essence of what it means to be human;our bond to the earth, to each other, and to a shared future.

“Extractions” invites contemplation on the intersection of art, ecology, and industrialization, and reflection on our role and responsibility within and outside of this specific space. We are nature//we are the thing itself.