The Brooklyn Rail

Linnéa Gad’s practice is defined by perpetual return. Born in Stockholm, Gad grew up on the sea cliffs, playing with seaweed and stones in the Swedish archipelago. Though she now works primarily from her upstate New York studio, the landscape of Gad’s youth is ever-present in her work. Her latest solo exhibition, Return of the Mollusk, emerges from her longstanding fascination with lime—as an artistic medium in frescoes and cave paintings, as a foundational element of lime mortar (the earliest known man-made substance), and, most importantly for Gad, as the material mollusks use to create their shells layer by layer.

Some of Gad’s sculptures on view at Astor Weeks incorporate lime’s varied forms—oyster shells, limestone, lapis lazuli—but even more prominent is the connection between lime’s lifecycle and Gad’s approach toward all mediums. Her practice is iterative and accumulative, reminiscent of a mollusk gradually building its shell. Across her expansive ecosystem of welded steel and amber glass, bronze works, ceramics, lime mortar structures, and painted wood panels, Gad’s processes of layering and return evoke cycles of decay, overgrowth, and regeneration—a palimpsest spanning both earthly and cosmic scales.

The exhibition’s opening display gathers many of Gad’s smaller sculptures into what resembles a cabinet of curiosities, its rows of populated shelves invoking the eclectic collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most pieces look like they were collected directly from the ocean floor, newly mounted for display after years of weathering by the sea. Conch (2024), for example, is aptly named; the sculpture’s undulating forms and brown-and-white glaze closely mimic a mollusk’s calcareous exoskeleton. For Conch and its companion ceramics, Gad begins by collecting bark and twigs on her hikes upstate. After shaping these sourced materials, she coats them in ceramic slip, fires them, and applies various glazes. The outcome is a transubstantiation of one protective surface into another—a tree’s shielding exterior morphs into the shell of a sea-dwelling creature. This work is also symbolic of Gad’s dual geography; even in her new landscape, she summons that of her home, returning, again, to the mollusk.

Neighboring works on the shelves further evidence Gad’s layering techniques. Corrodes II (2024) achieves its encrusted, coral-like appearance through lost-wax casting, in which Gad uses one of her cardboard and paper pulp sculptures to create a unique bronze, then painting age on its surface with a bismuth patina. The sculpture’s porcelain base bears marks and hues imparted by its firing in a wood kiln. Meanwhile, welded steel works like Slider (2024) introduce us to Gad’s distinctive approach to metal, intentionally eroding certain areas while cultivating barnacle-like accretions in others.

These small-scale works embody Gad’s signature material mediations. They appear like the product of natural forces over time. In their facture, Gad imbues her works with a sense of immediate age value, as if they were objects of discovery, not creation; only the slight traces of their made-ness—Gad’s hand at work—reveal their crafted nature. Seen together, each object seems to possess its own lifecycle, its own place within the expanse of deep time Gad so readily evokes.

Scale expands in the exhibition’s second gallery. While some sculptural bodies have long legs as if they could travel around the room, others are upheld by tall scaffolding. With Mantle (2024), one of her welded steel sculptures encircling a blown amber glass core, Gad communicates the dependent relationship between a mollusk’s soft interior and its shell. The spindly steel poles connecting the sculpture’s mass to its base suggest the creature’s tentacles, used for feeding, sensing, and movement. Their curves invite the latent possibility that the work may reach out from, or move off of, its base. The narrowness of these poles, relative to the sculpture’s height, escalates the vulnerability of the mollusk’s body, captured by the fluid, golden shape of the amber glass, which (excitingly, daringly) cannot be fully contained by its metal shell.

Across the room, Repose (2023), a vast welded steel work, insists that Gad’s organic, primordial world is not without industry. Its discoloration, rippled surface, and exhaustive scoring render the sculpture like a once-discarded piece of a deteriorating ship, but its title communicates a gentler mood, suggesting a creature reclined in rest. During my visit, sunlight poured through the holes in the top sheet of metal onto its backside, animating the work’s interior with a glowing constellation. This is but one of many instances where Gad approaches the cosmic.

Among the show’s most striking works, Eon Scape II (2024) bridges the oceanic and celestial. Positioned as the gallery’s centerpiece, the substantial oil and toner painting on panel portrays a sweeping vista, legible as sunlight bouncing off the sea or stars scattered across a swirling cosmos. It links these realms, mirroring water with stardust, the cycles of life and death in nebulae with those of marine organisms. Attending to these processes of rebirth from a single sea creature to an entire solar system, Return of the Mollusk presents a universal interconnectivity. In this moment, Gad’s work offers a meaningful reorientation toward non-human lifeforms, landscapes, and timescales, engaging in a kind of environmental poetics that reflects on dwelling within a broader eco-sphere.