Liv Ingeborg Ottersen (b. 1966) is a Norwegian visual artist working across painting, textile and installation. Her practice explores fragments, memory and transformation through materials including tulle, thread, paper, gold leaf and sections of earlier paintings.

 

Since returning to Norway in 2023, Ottersen has increasingly moved beyond the boundaries of the canvas. She cuts, relocates and sews together painted fragments, allowing threads and textiles to extend into the surrounding space. In her installations, translucent materials enter into dialogue with architectural structures, creating shifting relationships between fragility and solidity, surface and space.

 

Participation is also central to Ottersen’s recent work. Handwritten messages, suspended threads and accumulating paper fragments allow installations to develop through the presence and actions of others. Rather than presenting a fixed or completed whole, the works remain open to movement, alteration and new connections. Across both painting and installation, traces of what has been broken, displaced or preserved become starting points for new forms.

 

Ottersen studied at Otis College of Art and Design and received her BFA from the Art Institute of Southern California. She also studied Art Direction at Westerdals School of Communication and attended the National Teachers College for Arts and Crafts in Oslo. Having lived and worked in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, London, Granada and Oslo, her practice has been shaped by movement between places, materials and cultural contexts.

 

Recent presentations include the participatory installation Unspoken Messages at the Larnaca Biennale in 2025, a site-specific installation at The Pavilion in Frogner Park, Oslo, in 2026, and work presented at Transcendentalia in St. Adalbert’s Church, Wrocław, Poland.