ANAIS ÖST: TRACE, TENSION, AND TRANSFORMATION

Anais Öst, a Peruvian-Swedish artist based in London, works at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and sensory experience, translating the elemental forces of light, sound, and time into spatial forms. Drawing from a background in contemporary music and a profound interest in geography, Öst creates work that is less about the object and more about the conditions it activates. Her practice interrogates how we perceive and inhabit shifting landscapes—both natural and psychological - and how we locate ourselves within them.

Öst’s materials - ranging from corten and stainless steel to mirrors and environmental elements - are shaped not only by human intervention but also by time, pressure, erosion, and absence. Her sculptures act as vessels: for memory, for energy, for what has passed and cannot be held. In Öst’s world, weight and fragility coexist. Stillness and movement are not opposites but collaborators. There is no monument without weathering, no form without flow.

Her work operates like a geographic poem - folding in cycles of transformation, sedimentation, and rupture - each piece holding the trace of something once there. Whether evoking a vanished riverbed or the shimmer of a broken reflection, Öst constructs not objects, but atmospheres. She invites the viewer into a slowed perception of time, where memory, emotion, and terrain dissolve into one another.

Alluvial Plinth, 2025

Alluvial Plinth reflects on what remains after movement - on the slow, unseen forces that shape landscapes and memory alike. Forged in corten steel, the sculpture resembles a pedestal, but not one for heroism or permanence. Instead, it is a form shaped by imagined erosion, by the sediment of what has passed through.

There is a quietness to the piece - a hollow center that speaks not of emptiness, but of holding. It offers a sanctuary for the ephemeral, a monument to the transient. By invoking the language of geology and riverine time, Öst reframes the plinth as both vessel and residue: what supports, what carries, and what lets go. It is a tender meditation on absence as presence, on the architecture of what once was.

Cascadia (A ____ ________, I fear), 2025

In Cascadia (A ____ ________, I fear), a cylinder of polished steel is violently crushed, yet from its rupture pours a waterfall of refracted light. The piece embodies a paradox of destruction and radiance, inviting the viewer to confront beauty born of pressure. Its surface does not reflect in clarity, but fractures the gaze - mirroring the self not as it is, but as it fears to be: splintered, unstable, yet luminous.

Öst uses the material’s brutality to explore tenderness. The title, trailing off into silence, opens a space of fear, memory, and unspoken thought. What cascades here is not just light, but a psychological weight - grief, awe, recognition. Still, it flows. Despite the fracture, or perhaps because of it.

20/20 Vision, 2024

20/20 Vision is a small, wall-mounted relic of personal and collective retrospection. A rearview mirror from a past journey bears the fading imprint of a road trip, a year, a moment suspended between clarity and blur. The work reflects on the instability of memory and the impossibility of exact return. Vision - like time - is never precise. What was once sharp becomes spectral, dislocated.

The mirror, an object of looking back, becomes a portal not to the past but to a distortion of it. Öst’s use of image transfer and vintage material evokes nostalgia while resisting sentimentality. What the viewer sees is not the past itself, but the space where it once was. In this fragment, she offers a meditation on disintegration, longing, and the temporal echo of landscapes now gone.

Images: ©Anais Öst, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: MIAO