through 150 dry wellbores

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Through 150 dry wellbores (2005)

4 Drawings, ink on paper 70 x 70 cm, and 84 x 80 cm.

Commission for the gas tanker “Arctic princess” (one of the ships carrying gas from the “Snowhite” field outside Northern Norway).

The four drawings depicts every dry well bore drilled in Norwegian sector from the start of Norwegian oil exploitation in 1967 to August 1984, when the “Snowhite” gas field was discovered.

“Dry well bores” are (test)drill holes that shows no trace of neither oil nor gas. They are obviously disappointments, but they are also important sources of information, pointing out directions of further search.

The numbers and colour-codes on the drawings describes the chronology, dept of sea, and the dept of bores below the bottom of the sea. They illustrate how this search constantly is pushed further north, and deeper down.

The bores are connected with a line going from no 1 through to 150, suggesting either an imaginary dry, flow-less network of tubes, or a time-journey on the surface, mirroring the time-journey through the geographical layers of sediments down through each drill-hole.