Solveig Settemsdal's work revolves around organic elements suggesting relationships between the external world and the internal, the seen and the imagined explored in the abstractions of nature, especially of the internal components of a body. Settemsdal is very attracted to the stuff-ness of things, how they can be manipulated and moved, as well as interchanged through abstraction or material variation.

Though form can be stripped from functionality, some connotations remain. A body delivered for dissection, an organ taken out of its niche, left on a table. A component without a machine, it finds itself recreated in its own image, deprived of its normal function but given new freedom to exist alone. As it has now become a character, an imbued parody of an organ, and only a faint memory of function remains, it must adapt to being the subject.

Settemsdal wants to create a protagonist or environment with a suggestive ambiguity, a vessel in which to conduct an exploration into how a form mirrored in another material or reality can create a tension between the striae - revealing and concealing in alternation. Settemsdal fears the absolute and sterile, yet attempts to control the chaos of nature within her work, the sharp lines of graphic art are disturbed by the personal and expressionistic. Macabre grandiosity is coupled with the childlike and innocent, a prevailing duality in her practice.