Kim Laybourn

Text excerpts by Kim Laybourn, exhibition essay by Una Mathiesen Gjerde

Deep in the belly of the earth. In the labyrinthine tunnels, twisting endlessly, in sinuous root systems, where nothing grows, the undead haunt the stones. Confused and tormented existences, that haunt the soil, from which the plants grow. Remnants that linger in a dark past that obscures their minds and understanding. The bedrock will not be known by them. They do not belong anywhere. The only thing that keeps them company is dead thoughts. Thoughts no roots.

What if the origin of life is found in the mold itself, that is in the clay? An almost fifteen-year-old study from Cornell University suggests that the clay, in reaction with seawater, created a type of hydrogel, which came to be a hotbed for biochemical reactions that, with time, developed into life. The biblical quote “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” suddenly becomes more convincing. But as is often the case in scientific research, the theory from Cornell University cannot be proven. However, it remains plausible as long as it is not disproven. Nevertheless, we still cannot say with certainty exactly how life originated on Earth – and most likely we never will. It is a chemical and biological question, but also a philosophical one; widening the perspective, also allows one to ask what actually makes something alive.

How nature is understood and read is central to Kim Laybourn’s artistic practice. It is about challenging the dichotomous divides, constructed and reinforced through scientific, economic and cultural institutions, primarily in the spirit of the Occidental modernist-enlightenment. This has manifested itself through a number of projects, most recently in the film The Animate Landscape (2024) where the viewer follow a series of animated plants in various forest and plain landscapes. What can first be experienced as “natural” movements become more intense, convincing the viewer that it is of the plant’s own will; the plant acquires a subject. This immediately resonates with the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s metaphysics of mixture [métaphysique du mélange], where living things are not separated from their environment; they live in coexistence with external elements. By making the plants the protagonists of the narrative, Laybourn similarly suggests that we humans (who watch the video) cannot allow ourselves to reduce the landscape to an ambient backdrop for our own activity, but rather must understand nature as something (or someone) with which we coexist on the planet.

Earth’s greatest fear is loneliness. The obscurity caused by the shadows of countless grains pressed together is frightening enough in itself, but at least one is never alone in this shared darkness. Once they were all alone. They drifted nowhere, without direction, through the vast and endless void of the universe. There in the murk between the stars, they lost all sense of self, of belonging. This is a darkness of a different kind – not woven from the cast shadows of too many beings gathered in one place, but rather of the absence of all things in too much space. Here they fell, accompanied only by an unfathomable abundance of time. Fall long enough and you become numb. Fall even further and the mind becomes still.

This chain of thought is taken one step further in The Realm of Things, shifting the focus towards that of the mineral world; rocks and fossils – dead plants, insects and animals that live on in the depths of the earth, petrified. At BO, these mineral ghost stories unfold in sculpture and film. Spread across two of the exhibition rooms, Laybourn has placed three relief sculptures, alluding to vaulted walls, windows and doors. Figuratively, they can be read as portals into another (or perhaps rather inner?) dimension. The artist leads the audience towards the dark and hidden spaces of the earth, its archive. The reliefs are decorated with motifs showing rough cliff edges and rock structures, surrounded by human-like eyes that meet the eye of the viewer. This alludes to Laybourn’s earlier relief series Homobotanik (2024), where the same gazing eyes, as the title insinuates,  are to be found among plant-like imagery. Both series propose a disruption of the traditional dynamic between human and environment, the observer and what is observed, where humans traditionally occupy an acting role and hierarchically superior position, by virtue of being the one who sees. What happens when our human gaze is met with that of plants and minerals?

Above the eyes and stone figures, Laybourn has placed numerous light formations, these can be read as stars or reflections from smoother stones. The star-like shape takes us from the interior of the earth to space – to various floating objects, other planets and celestial elements that we perceive as stars, that in reality also are stones. Our terrestrial environment is isolated, but still it reflects an infinite eternity far beyond our comprehension. So far, it is precisely the mineral kingdom that has offered the objects that have come to the earth after its origin; roughly 25 million extraterrestrial particles of stardust penetrate the atmosphere every day, most of which burn up, and the fallout thus remains invisible to our eyes – but from time to time they also rain down as meteorites. These encounters between extraterrestrials and our own rocks serve as a reminder that our isolation, like the permanence of landscapes, is imagined. Everything that happens is constantly changing, we are part of something that is unlimited in time and space.

An encounter with the stones, with the grains of sand, the dust particles, is an encounter with a strange non-human understanding of time. An abyssal time. Inconceivable to us. Our history is written, like writing in water, but the grains remain, all the way to the end.

Stones in motion are also present in Laybourn’s new video work, created for this exhibition. Here, a series of stones collected at the artist’s home in South Funen in the summer of 2025 come into play. We encounter flint stones, fossils and Stone Age artifacts. Some scenes also show various fossils and Stone Age tools from museum collections around the world. Like the plants in The Animate Landscape, the stones are given their own subject through movement, animated by the artist himself. Similarly, the film’s soundtrack is also handmade, using Foley sound, which Laybourn has recorded in his own studio. The film’s protagonists, i.e. the found stones, reoccur physically, through casts, in the exhibition as a separate installation, spread throughout the space. Some are accompanied by text, drawings or embedded color patterns; individual features that further substantiate their subjectivity.

Both challenging understandings of living contra the dead, The Realm of Things is described by the artist as a direct continuation of The Animate Landscape. That plants are living being is an established truth that few would dispute. Containing, and processing carbon, they are by definition – in common with humans and animals – organic material. When we move into the mineral kingdom, this becomes more complex. For even if organic material is found in fossils, these are typically considered dead – that is, no longer alive. However, if one allows one self to take one step to the side, and dispute the relationship between life and death as purely linear, can we not also claim that there is a form of life – or at least a potential for life – in the mineral kingdom as well? Furthermore, and regardless of whether the minerals are alive or not, one can challenge whether the “living” necessarily has a greater justification for existence than that of the “dead”. Isn’t the very idea that ​​life is a decisive to how we assess hierarchies between different existences in itself an anthropocentric undertaking?

Matias Faldbakken’s novel Vi er fem [We Are Five], revolves around a family whose lives take a drastic turn when the father, Tormod, creates a living clay creature by mixing red clay with fertilizer. The clay creature acts as both a mysterious friend and a terrifying, abject figure, establishing contact between the family and the more-than-human. Similarly, Laybourn’s animated minerals also open for a transcendence, where the audience can choose to enter a more fantastic reality, a place where the hierarchical distinctions between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, people and landscape, cease. In this dissolution, we are confronted with our own delusional image. By reducing rocks, plants and animals to something lesser-than-human, we have allowed an unlimited, capitalist exploitation of the earth’s common resources. If we – in reverse – attribute agency to them, even if only imagined, it quickly becomes obvious that our reduction of the more-than-human is ultimately just as much a reduction of ourselves.

Just as the wind can carry voices and songs across great distances, the hard earth and the deep-reaching underground rock formations can also move vast masses of voices and songs beneath oceans and continents. Tossed from grain of soil to grain of soil, from shard of stone to shard of stone, they hum and resonate through the body of the planet. If you wish to hear them, it is no use stopping to listen, for they fall silent at once. They hide their words within what your ears perceive as noise, in the piercing sounds of friction. That is precisely where you must listen closely. The faster you trudge, and the more noisily you plant your boots in the gravel, the deeper the resonance their words acquire.

About the artist

Acknowledgements