Skålnes received her Bachelor Degree in Photography from Southampton Solent University (2012). She works within the genre of aesthetic jounalism, using still and moving images as well as sound. The focus of her graduation project A Rural Society: Jøa is urbanisation and depopulation in Norway. An attempt to observe how a country well known for having people settled in every nook and cranny, now has 80% of population living in urban settlements. Her line of inquiry was to focus on these inhabitants, the 20% who live in the outskirts. As such the investigation is a subjective portrayal of the lives of the people who stay. The resulting artwork aesthetically depicts Jøa, an island in Nord-Trøndelag with 500 inhabitants, situated 680 meters from the mainland. Choosing an ethnographic approach, Skålnes spent time on Jøa, getting to know the local people, experientially engaging with how locality plays into the Norwegian identity. The individual stories she encountered highlights a more general development that endangers a lot of small communities in Norway. The final result consists of a series of photographs, depicting both scenes and people, a sound piece, consisting of three interviews and a four-hour long film showing the trip between the island and the mainland.

Listen to the full sound piece here.