Terroir entered my thinking through wine. In vitivinicultural terms, it names a shared inheritance — soil, climate, human practice — distinctive enough that two plots of land growing the same grape variety can produce entirely different wines. Winemakers speak about this with real enthusiasm, an appreciation for how a specific patch of ground expresses itself through what grows there. But there’s also a quieter element of closure in the idea: a terroir is defined partly by what it excludes, a concentration achieved by not mixing, a sense of purity that can start to sound uncomfortable once you say it out loud. As a metaphor for human culture, that logic doesn’t hold up well. As a way of describing a collaboration between people and land, and a willingness to let nature express itself rather than override it, it holds up better.
Territory arrived from somewhere less comfortable — the geopolitical unease sitting over the world right now: land claims, annexation, disputed borders, the question of who has the right to move across someone else’s ground. This isn’t abstract for me. I grew up in Greenland, a place currently working out its own relationship to Denmark, its own path toward becoming something more fully its own country, while larger powers circle a territory rich in resources and geography. Territory is real estate as much as it’s identity. Its borders are sometimes drawn and formal, sometimes invisible and disputed, and either way they hold culture and language inside them — shaping a sense of belonging for some, something to escape for others.
What connects the two words, for me, is less about ownership and more about what a place gives a person or a thing that grows there, and what it withholds by drawing a line around itself.
The hardest part of working with this theme is resisting the pull toward being literal. Terroir and territory both carry real emotional weight for a lot of people, myself included, and the temptation is to turn that into commentary or depiction — a political statement wearing the clothes of a painting. That’s not the interest. The interest is the emotional charge underneath the politics: what it feels like to belong somewhere, to be shaped by a place, to watch that place be contested by others. I don’t yet know where this theme is going, or whether it stays contained to one series or surfaces differently across several. It’s early, and it’s still finding its shape.
See artworks in following series: