It was the summer of 2025, during "Gråsone," the annual exhibition for us first-year students at Kunstskolen i Stavanger. My piece, Friction, sat in the windowsill, a silent observer. It's a humbling thing to watch a work you created take on a life entirely its own, one that defies your original intentions. I had designed it to be a conversation, an interactive piece, but it chose a monologue. And in its silence, it ended up saying more than I ever could have planned.

The sculpture's form is a confession in itself. A bust in black PLA, fractured with fine cracks that reveal the dense, heavy cement I poured inside it. It is the physical manifestation of an internal pressure building until the exterior can no longer hold. Its head is open, cradling a sphere—the mind. This sphere is not whole; it is a corrupted, sick-looking globe, deeply cracked and textured. Some fissures are melted shut, old wounds scarred over, while others remain raw, threatening to split. It is a fragile core, held together only by the confines of the skull it rests in.

My intent was for this fragile mind to be touched. I imagined viewers spinning the sphere, the friction of their hands warming its heat-sensitive surface, causing it to blush with color—from cold gray to a living orange and yellow. It was meant to be a metaphor for connection, for an external force bringing warmth and change to a troubled, internalized world.

But no one touched it.

For the entire exhibition, it remained still. Perhaps it was its placement, turned away from the room. Perhaps the motif itself was too vulnerable, too personal, creating a barrier of its own. Or maybe in a group show, it simply became part of the scenery. That failure to connect, however, became the work’s most potent statement. A piece about being stuck became literally stuck in its own solitude. The invitation for external help was offered, but never accepted, mirroring a reality far more accurately than my original concept.

The irony deepened with the materials themselves. Even if someone had touched it, the massive, cold weight of the cement inside acted as a heat sink. It would have taken a profound and sustained warmth to make the sphere change color, a warmth that a fleeting human touch could never provide. The internal coldness was simply too powerful to be overcome by the interaction I had planned.

And yet, it did change color. Not from a human hand, but from the sun. As the days passed, I would watch the sunlight stream through the hazy window – a portal that offered only blurred hints of the outside world, distant, indistinct objects – and the sliver of the sphere it touched would slowly, quietly, glow with a warm, vibrant yellow. The sculpture, ignored by the very people I hoped would engage with it, was having its own private dialogue with the sun. Its gaze out the window was not one of longing, but of reception, through a filter that kept the external world at bay. It found its warmth not from the community within the room, but from a vast, indifferent, external force. Friction taught me that the meaning of a work is not just in what the artist intends, but in what happens when it is left alone. It became a piece not about the need for connection, but about the profound difficulty of achieving it, and the unexpected, impersonal places from which warmth and change might finally come.