Elisabeth, July

The dining room looks and feels very different. No longer witness to the chattering of residents and clinking of cutlery, the commissary tables and long benches are gone and replaced with row upon row of white sheets like sails awaiting their ships. The exhibition, titled ‘Recovery Reframed’, is the first of its kind in Norway and seen as a groundbreaking attempt to rehabilitate some of the country’s most prolific drug addicts by restoring their art careers left in ruins by addiction. Similar programs have already met with great success in New York and London, and Oslo is keen to follow suit.

The management of Villa Vinternatt is busy organizing the installation, and the stress of it all is etched on their faces. Carpenters are still busily constructing the gallery while staff meticulously pin small white description cards to each piece in an attempt to make some sense of what the artist is trying to convey. The media has taken quite an interest in the story and several journalists are expected to attend the vernissage, hoping to speak to the artists themselves.

Elisabeth is one of the most high-profile artists in the group and her series of five paintings all center on the recurrent theme of blood. She smiles to herself as she stands back and looks at her work, knowing that a part of her is on the canvas, her blood, guided by the brush strokes of her memories. Memories so dark that the only way she feels she can survive sometimes is to get them out of her physically. Nobody knows that she cuts herself. The inside of her mouth hides the lacerations; it’s one of her many secrets and it brings her a strange thrill to know that her blood is there, unhidden, on the canvas for everyone to see. Her haunting imagery sees wild animals, scared, trapped and abandoned, fused against a bleak swirling landscape of rich earthy tones. Bloodshot eyes, bloodied mouths, bleeding wounds, blood-emptied open bellies.

Her thoughts are interrupted by a junior counselor asking her to change as the guests will be arriving in the next thirty minutes. Elisabeth makes her way back to her room and rifles through the few items of clothing in her wardrobe. It actually hasn’t occurred to her that it might be nice to wear something special on a night like tonight. She throws on a navy chiffon blouse and the only pair of trousers she owns that aren’t sweatpants, adding a flick of mascara and a touch of lipstick. Perfume is banned at Villa Vinternatt because it contains alcohol, as if she would glug her favorite Chanel, and the thought makes her smile impulsively at herself in the mirror. Her palms start to sweat as she heads back to the dining room, the hum of voices rising up the stairwell from the formal reception rooms downstairs.