Tonje Moe PETTERSEN
Born 1978, Norwegian
Tonje Moe Pettersen has a Master’s degree in Visual Art from Monash University in Melbourne. She has worked as an artist since 2005.
Tonje is interested in gathering and reassembling off images, extracting elements from their original context in order to create a new, imaginary world, inhabited by fragmented beings. Her work raises questions about female depiction in today’s media, its preoccupation with beauty and perfection and the incessant pushing of boundaries for what is acceptable in terms of nudity.
Tonje now lives in Gratangen, in northern Norway. In 2011 she exhibited at the opening of a new gallery in the Arctic Centre in Gratangen. In 2012, she was selected as one of eight artist to decorate the new Goliath platform outside Hammerfest. Tonje was selected due to her “highly independent artistic expression of spacious composition and abstracted forms.”
A quote from her blog is insightful:
“Grace is an awesome artist. And she set's not just nature who's been making art, because so have I. Lots of it! And although I'm not a par on her in the skill of creation, I let her inspire me, and I paint effortlessly, just like she does. Painting is fun when it is effortless. I often forget this, but at the moment I am remembering."
