Tankeplass "Vokterne"

From the ancient limestone of Furuberget — once hewn for churches and homes — Mattias Härenstam has shaped The Guardians. The stones now rise again, delicately balanced, bound by an unseen core, as though nature itself were pausing mid-breath.

This work speaks of protection and fragility, of the shifting boundaries between what threatens and what must be defended. Where cairns once stood as sentinels against forces from without, these columns remind us of the perils we have conjured within. Rooted in the history of the hillfort, the old quarry, and the surrounding nature reserve, The Guardians looks both backward and forward — to a time when nature was feared as wild and untamed, and to our own age, when it is nature that must be shielded from us.

Educated at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Härenstam works across a wide range of media. His art traces those moments when order falters and the hidden turbulence of the world breaks through — as it does here, in the quiet tension between stone, landscape, and the human hand.