Of Makers and Mice
By Grant Trimble.
Cincinnati OH, 2026.
I’ve known of Ingvild for around fifteen years through seeing her work online. We talked for an interview I did with her in 2018, which is how we first connected, but I only met her in person at the beginning of 2025. She had flown from Oslo, Norway to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live, to fix one of her dioramas that had been broken on its way to a local gallery. She stayed with my family and me for the week, and we were all able to get to know each other, and each other’s work, more deeply.
As dry as that anecdote may seem at first, some of Ingvild’s qualities begin to distinguish themselves once we put it in context. That she would fly over four thousand miles to repair her work, stay with a family of near strangers, and walk away feeling connected enough to ask for this essay, is telling. A decades-long commitment to art, a dedication to craft and vision, a wonderment paired with an affinity toward connection: these are only some of the virtues her dioramas are perched upon.
Ingvild’s dioramas bridge many disciplines. She builds, sculpts, paints, draws, and sews, and sets all of it alongside conceptually driven elements like found objects and a devotion to narrative. With such breadth of scope and technical prowess, one wouldn’t be remiss in thinking the medium would naturally command reverence within the academic tradition. Walking through museums and galleries shows this isn’t the case. Whatever the reasons it lacks such attention, I can’t help but think this is part of why Ingvild is drawn to it, even if only instinctively, and this is the first thing worth noticing. To work seriously in a medium the art world hasn’t bothered to canonize is already to set status aside. It is the opening instance of a gesture she is driven to repeat.
You see it again inside the work. Within their spaces the mice are not merely theatrical characterizations; they have a near-autonomous existence, temporarily frozen in time. The effect is that our vantage point drifts from that of the passive art patron toward that of a voyeuristic god captivated by diminutive creatures. It’s a given that pulling this off takes the technical skill to convincingly construct objects in their habitat. What gets overlooked is that it also takes the willingness to set the ego aside, to avoid interrupting the viewer with the small signals of construction that remind us how clever the artist is. The mice remain part of their world. Ingvild hides her hand despite having touched everything, all so the spell can remain unbroken. She understands that you cannot attend to the creator and the created at the same time, just as you cannot see a complete painting while looking at the brushstrokes. Her choices are at the service of the work, which is the same self-effacement as her choice of medium, only now turned inward. What she removes, in both cases, is whatever would block the eye.
And what the eye is freed to see is something close to childhood. The Beatrix Potter tone transports us easily to a wholesome vision of a parent reading to their little ones, tucking them into bed under the warmth of a soft incandescent light. Rather than belittling such coziness, the work asks us to indulge in it, and invites us back into a child’s wonder, a place we don’t often occupy as adults. But can such wonder exist without the innocence that usually comes with it?
Most of us confuse innocence with naivety, so we treat the joy of being lost in the mythological journeys of anthropomorphic animals as something to outgrow. It isn’t. This joy is evidence of a capacity we still have — an agency that can meet the world with wonder. We assume this wonder belongs to a part of life sealed off from adulthood, something we cannot hold in the same hand as obligations like taxes. Ingvild shows otherwise, and shows it without sentimentality. She understands that you can’t be curious and fearful at the same time, and that choosing curiosity doesn’t keep you from grasping tragedy. Even as her mice face demonic creatures and homicidal caretakers, we look closer, not out of perverseness, but because the wonder itself lets us confront horror without a total breakdown. We keep our agency and go on dancing with the world. Wonder and innocence are the antidote to being naive and paralyzed by fear.
This is the same move Ingvild makes to build the work in the first place. To enter the wondering position, the viewer has to set aside the fearful, defended ego. To produce that position, the artist has to set aside hers. The voyeuristic god who forgets there is an artist is the mirror image of the child who forgets to be afraid. Maker and viewer perform the same act of humility but from opposite sides of the glass.
It wouldn’t be unfair for someone to call my claims here ad hoc. Perhaps Ingvild is simply a talented craftsperson making fun little worlds for people to enjoy. That she pulls from personal memory, historical and cultural stories, and childhood feeling is just her raw material. Maybe it’s not that deep. My response is that this position could only be half true, and that being half true is exactly the problem. Being a good craftsperson, a captivating storyteller, someone who can tap into states of mind and color life and hold attention in a particular way: none of that is a given. Go ahead and try it. But the depth I’m pointing to isn’t a claim I’m laying over the work from outside. It’s an effect the work reliably produces in those who stand before it. And consistent effects are not an accident. A reductive explanation can account for the craft and still miss the thing the craft is for.
The work may not be explicitly about any of this. Implicitly, though, it is about almost nothing else. To put it in Proust’s spirit, there are worlds that sit before us, but only for those with the eyes to see. Ingvild’s whole practice clears the eye. She removes the maker from view so a world can come through, and quiets our own fear so we can look at it. That is what wonder is, once you strip the naivety out of it. It’s not an escape from the world but a fuller entry into it.
And this, finally, is what explains the anecdote I opened with. Wonder of this kind doesn’t stay behind glass. It deepens engagement until engagement becomes devotion, and devotion, given enough of it, gets on a plane. It crosses four thousand miles to repair a small broken world and to find, in near strangers, the connection that the same disposition had been making possible all along.
Published in the book Ingvild A. Eiring Dioramaer 2014 -2026
