Leave Your Clothes at the Door
Leave Your Clothes at the Door is a genesis for Eleen Halvorsen’s artistic career. For the first time, the Norwegian-American multidisciplinary artist, who mostly specializes in conceptual fashion, tapped into sculptural work and paintings for this solo exhibition. This coming-of-age moment for Halvorsen has helped her confront vulnerability, the female body, autonomy, sexuality, identity, and self-expression.
Halvorsen constructed her sculptures with concrete, accompanied by hardware, metals, steel, and leather. Her large-scale oil paintings act as the body, serving as both subject and emotion. Creating these metaphorical artworks was a nerve-wracking yet liberating experience—displaying cathartic acts of innocence and danger.
Halvorsen spoke with 1202 MAGAZINE about how Leave Your Clothes at the Door came to life, her creative process behind the pieces, the emotions she experienced while crafting the artworks, and how this has helped her express more vulnerability going forward.
This is your first exhibition with sculpture and painting. How does it feel in comparison to your previous artworks?
Compared to what I’ve done before, this show feels more intimate but also freer. It’s the first time I’m presenting a full body of work that isn’t mediated through clothing or the physical body and its proportions, yet the pieces are still deeply connected to the body’s emotional and psychological space. It’s both a continuation and a shedding, like stepping into the room without a layer of protection, and trusting the work to hold its own.
How does this exhibition explore the woman’s body?
The woman’s body is present in this exhibition not through literal depiction, but through the emotional, psychological, and physical energies that shape each piece. It’s less about accurately representing the female form and more about revealing the internal experiences that live within it.
Can you walk me through the creative design process behind the pieces and the exhibition as a whole?
My process for this exhibition was a push/pull between instinct and control. I structured each piece around an initial internal experience or idea, and I would then let the materials guide how those states could take shape.
For the sculptures, I worked almost like I do with garment making: building forms around an imagined body, manipulating steel wire the way I would drape fabric, letting it curve, tense, and resist. Then, layering concrete by hand, allowing it to hold those gestures permanently. It became this dialogue between fragility and strength, how far a form could be pushed before it broke, and what happened in that space of tension.
The paintings come from a much more subconscious place. I approached them as emotional landscapes, using movement and layering to trace the outlines of an internal figure rather than a literal one. They’re built through repeated gestures, adding, scraping back, exposing earlier marks, almost like peeling back layers of memory or instinct.
How did you choose the materials used throughout the pieces?
Contrast and tension are a big part of my work, and with the sculptures, I wanted to juxtapose traditionally masculine construction materials like concrete and steel against the organically abstract female bodies. Hoping to create something that reads both feminine and aggressive at the same time. The steel wire acts almost like a skeletal structure or a stand-in for muscle and tension. It’s flexible but holds memory; every bend and twist records the movement of my hands. Concrete, on the other hand, brings permanence. When I hand-apply it, it behaves almost like skin, fragile while wet, then hardening into something resilient, even protective.
With the bike seat sculptures, it was important for me to source used and vintage seats that already carry the memory of a body, its friction, wear, and sweat, each one then bound with hand-dyed leather straps, similar to the leather details I use in my garments.
As for the paintings, it was a natural choice to work in oil rather than acrylics. It feels more aligned with the materials I use in my garment and leatherwork, where I rely on natural fibers and high-quality, traditional materials rather than modern synthetics. In my opinion, working with oil paint has a very different feel compared to working with acrylics, like buttery-soft leather versus synthetic leather.
How has this helped you show more vulnerability in your work?
As opposed to clothing as an armor or layer of identity, the artworks feel more intimately personal; there’s no model, styling, or makeup to hide behind, the work has to stand on its own. The sculptures and paintings let me work with gesture and abstraction in a way that feels almost like revealing the emotional underpinnings of my previous work.
