Meet the Artist: Ragna Bley Paints with Salt, and Time

In Ragna Bley’s paintings, certainty dissolves. Color does not fill form but seeps, spills, stratifies. Pigment is moved not only by hand but by snow, gravity, evaporation, and time. What results is neither landscape nor abstraction, but a field of suspended becoming—where image and atmosphere, presence and residue, converge. Her work unfolds at the threshold of perception, where the known dissolves into something more elemental, and perhaps, more real.

This past June, “Move Baby, Move”—Bley’s second solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias in London—unfurled a series of large-scale works made with transparent-primed linen, custom squeegees, pigments laced with salt and snow. The canvases register not only gestures but seasons, melts, crystallisations. They are temporal bodies—porous, mutable, cosmically scaled. At once intimate and planetary, they seem to echo cycles of erosion, growth, and drift: visual terrains in slow transformation.

Born in Uppsala and based in Oslo, Bley draws from biology, science fiction, and poetry to explore what resists language. Her practice is attuned to ambiguity—not as lack, but as a site of potential. She paints as a way of thinking, without conclusion. Her works resist finality; they invite us to stay inside the in-between—between the visual and the felt, the cellular and the stellar, the human and the more-than-human.

In the conversation that follows, Bley reflects on material intelligence, the choreography of doubt, and the strange clarity that arises when control is released. We speak about painting as residue, snow as a slow collaborator, and what it means to make images that unfold like weather—cosmic, uncertain, and alive.

WHITEWALL: Your paintings are often suspended in that space between image and atmosphere — between sensation and recognition. What draws you to this state of ambiguity?

RAGNA BLEY: I think in many ways I am quite an analytical person; I find comfort in understanding things and acquiring a sense of control. So, working towards the unknown—beyond the boundaries of my own understanding—is a challenge to myself. I think there can be a nerve in a state of ambiguity; it creates a tension and even sometimes a kind of frustration, which is important not just in art.

My impression is that, in our society, there is a pressure to have clear categories and names for things—for people’s identities or whatever it might be. Ambiguity can be a challenge and create insecurity, but I also think it can bring to light our set assumptions. There is a kind of freedom there—a freedom also in not knowing.

“There is a kind of freedom there—a freedom also in not knowing,”

—Ragna Bley

In some ways, culturally, the claim of meaning is imposed on us constantly. So, things that refuse to clearly state their meaning or meaningfulness become important—maybe like a breath between sentences.

I think we need images of intangible things, things that are real but not easily depicted—be it microscopic life, changing climate, feelings, or sensed things: holding your hand in lukewarm water, dust in your eyes. 

Artist Ragna Bley Masters the Art of Letting Go

WW: You’ve spoken about letting go of control in your practice. How do you know when a painting is finished — or at least, when to stop?

RB: I think a lot of it has to do with the internal logic developed within the practice—a kind of system. Much of it comes back to restraint, the fragile moments when you see promise in the work, and when it is so easy to be enchanted, seduced, and to succumb to working on it just a little bit more. Much of painting is learning when not to paint, and to both trust and sometimes override your instinct—to refuse some habitual thinking, but of course, at the same time, to also trust a certain experience. I think, for me, there is a sense—when a work is finished—that there is nothing more I could do or add, and that the work leaves me a little puzzled, like, ‘I don’t know what I did, why, or how it’s working,’ but it does something to me. It has a kind of nerve. Some works become finished but don’t leave the studio, just because they feel too obvious in some way.

An Outdoor Painting Project

WW: The use of snow and salt is so visceral and time-bound. Do you remember the first time you introduced these elements into your work? What did that moment open up for you?

RB: This idea of expanding the painting and collaborating with external forces started early on and was realized, for example, in my exhibition at Malmö Konsthall (2020). There, I made a group of large paintings that were placed outside. I had sewn in pockets of pigmentation—spices, coffee, berry powders, and dye—so at the beginning of the exhibition, the canvases were white. Over the course of weeks and months, rain and snow seeped into the works, and the paintings painted themselves.

I’m currently developing another outdoor painting project for the Contemporary Austin in Texas, where the humidity and temperature will expose and change the works over time.

I’ve always been drawn to works that seem to have some kind of movement or layering—something that gives a sense of continued motion, despite being completely still. I’ve also been inspired by action painting, like Niki de Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings or the performative wave paintings by Lee Lozano. That drew me into thinking about how to make time-based paintings that continue to paint themselves after I’ve made the initial decisions—and to let that unfold for others to see. To be invited in, perhaps.

Using snow as a medium developed during the process of making this show—as a kind of play, and a way to bring in a different timeline to the making of the works. Mixing the paint with snow—and the amount used—meant that the application could take six, eight, or even twenty hours. I had to kind of babysit the paint, going in at regular intervals to spread it out. Not knowing how it would melt, how the pigment would mix—and as a result, creating layer upon layer of thin paint as different segments dried. It created a new container for making works that I could never have thought out in advance.

WW: You’ve described painting as a way to think without words. Has that ‘non-verbal thinking’ changed the way you move through the world, or how you observe daily life?

RB: I think it goes both ways—like, everything in life influences my work in some capacity, and probably the other way around too. Being around small—and now not-so-small—children, for example, makes this really apparent. And I think there are many things that don’t get explored or get attention in a rigorous, text-based setup or society. I think perhaps we operate in life as much—or even more—non-verbally than verbally.

But look, I love language and words, and I read a lot. I love reading novels—I think partly because there are no preexisting images. And there’s something in making art that goes between this intellectual—or at least sense-making—process in words, and doing things that wouldn’t make sense in text or on paper, but that work when you’re making them. Sometimes the most stupid idea is the best.

“Sometimes the most stupid idea is the best,”

—Ragna Bley

In the way I work, there are so many parts of the decision-making that are wordless—paths you go down and results you come to by making them. You wouldn’t be able to think it out in advance, or sometimes even describe it. Instead, you’re getting there by making. And I’m not sure that’s the equivalent of nonverbal thinking, but I’m continuously so interested in the movement between the distant, more analytic look and perspective, and the chain reaction in the process of making—painting, images, and objects.

Inside the Studio with Ragna Bley

WW: Some of the works in this show were once part of larger fields — connected, then separated. Do you think of them as fragments of a larger narrative, or as complete worlds on their own?

RB: I think I always work on my paintings as a group and on several at a time. They are all individual pieces, but created in symbiosis—ideas and influences migrating between the different works. They are distinctly different from each other, but there is a familiarity between them as well. I feel that, in some sense, each show has a certain choreography and rhythm, and the sense of narrative is created between the works as much as within any individual one.

WW: There’s a sense of both choreography and chance in the way you apply paint. Do you listen to anything—music, sound, silence—while you work?

RB: I listen to different things at different parts of the process. I listen to a lot of podcasts—about politics, history, relationships, philosophy—but when I need to focus on painting, I need something that can kind of slide into the background of my consciousness, where I can dip in and out. For this show, I listened to music—songs and playlists I know and have listened to many times before. I could probably repeat the same song ten times; it kind of puts you in a trance-like state. Other times, I prefer the radio—I like the linearity of it, I guess. In the same way, I like to watch TV—taking the decision-making out somehow. And I like the idea of many people listening to the same thing at the same time…