With The Shadows performance and installation, Hanne began to hint at the true dimensions of her artistic ambition and the vast scope of her vision. The five-part series of complex tableaux, each one added consecutively over five days, chronicled the history of the artist and her world. It traced her roots far into the shadowy ancient past of Nordic mythology, heathen gods and roving Vikings, and represented by images carved into bark and other natural materials using simple stone-age tools. In conclusion, an ominous foreshadowing of a future laid waste by environmental ruin was painted on and sculpted from non-biodegradable Styrofoam and plastic, the resulting chaos vividly demonstrated in a noisy audio-visual composition of blaring TVs and radio.

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The show not only included her own performance of From A Tree To A Tree, in which she held up bark to her body to re-enact the birth of Elma, the first woman created by the Nordic gods from an Elm tree; but Hanne also engaged her surroundings by staging another performance called The Shadow in which visitors to the gallery spontaneously participated by reading “The Shadow” by Hans Christian Andersen while sitting in a back-lit chair behind a paper curtain and thus becoming one of the countless newly formed shadows in the installation.

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This first use of shadows shows Hanne’s fascination with what has since become an important theme in her work, showing up in virtually every aspect of her art, including her latest photography and videography.