Bäverdans/Retracting motion

-A kinetic work about beavers, people and a place where everything is not what it seems and time and space follow their own rules.
A strange place in dramatic change; more and less visible traces in the landscape bear witness to people's sorrow, joy and living conditions from the younger Iron Age to the late 1900s.
The people have taken their cows and boats with them and left the hill, the forest and the beach behind. In the high forest, the spruce bark beetles eat their way through the last fir at a rapid pace.The road through the forest goes from occasional overhanging branches of fir, smaller fallen trees and stops short when we reach the coastal forest and the Beaver's kingdom. Total chaos reigns here with giant fallen aspens.
If we want to reach the shore, we have to do it on the beaver's terms and crawl and climb."

Beaver dance/Retracting motion

Retracted motion - Bäverdans"A kinetic work about beavers, people and a place where everything is not what it seems and time and space follow their own rules.
A strange place in dramatic change; more and less visible traces in the landscape bear witness to people's sorrow, joy and living conditions from the younger Iron Age to the late 1900s.
The people have taken their cows and boats with them and left the hill, the forest and the beach behind. In the high forest, the spruce bark beetles eat their way through the last fir at a rapid pace.The road through the forest goes from occasional overhanging branches of fir, smaller fallen trees and stops short when we reach the coastal forest and the Beaver's kingdom. Total chaos reigns here with giant fallen aspens.
If we want to reach the shore, we have to do it on the beaver's terms and crawl and climb."

In Retracting motion/ Beaver dance I have worked with stories, associations, materials and movement.
The beaver was long hunted for its so-called beaver gills, a substance used medicinally since ancient times. In 1871, the last known beaver in Sweden was killed. Two years later it was classified as a protected spices. This year marks 101 years since the first Norwegian beavers were reintroduced in Bjurälven in Jämtland. Today, the beaver is taking back its place and lives and thrives from north to south from wilderness to city.
Last winter, when visiting a hill (that I chose to not name to avoid disturbece of the wildlife) in the Mälarö-island, an island situated a few hours from Stockholm for the first time in ten years, I was amazed at the radical changes I saw the landscape undergoing.
Above an electric fence without electricity rises a beautifully grazed hill, I know there is no longer electricity in the fence nor cows in the pasture, yet I carefully close the gate behind me.
I am greeted by a beautiful cultural landscape dominated by low grass, moss, cherry, sedge, hazel, stone and ancient remains.
This is where things start to get confusing, here people have been moving around rocks since the Late Iron Age to the early 00's and things just aren't always what they seem.
Finding/remain No. 1, to the great disappointment of many, turn out not being a ancient forest or grave monument from the late iron age, in fact, it is an ambitious foundation for a nineteenth-century dance floor, one in my opinion an interesting relic in its own right.
Antiquities No. 2; almond-shaped rock formation, once again, not a grave monument from the late iron age, the Stone Formation turn out to be built by history enthusiasts in the early 2000s.
But don't despair! There are a whole bunch of graves on the hill, they are just a slightly older (younger iron age) and badly weathered so they pretty much just look like nature.
Down in the coastal forest we find ancient remains number four; large pits bear witness to how the island received its manure and how the city of Stockholm manged it's waste over hundreds of years.
Despite the beaver chaos, the view from the beach is still beautiful, in the air and light there is a scent of the lake and a promise of happiness and future beaver-luck.
Once down at the edge of the beach, I found four imaginative wooden objects.
The shape of objects evoked many different associations and I found it to be strongly influenced by how it is presented, especially if they are displayed vertically or horizontally
My initial working title was Beaver Gold and the idea was to gild them and put them back where I found them. Unfortunately, neither real gold, beaten metal nor glue and varnish belong in nature. It also turned out later that I had accidentally snuck in a few meters from their home.
During the course of the work, I learned more both about beavers and about the place and came to see more and more similarities between beavers and people, as well as to be fascinated by the lives of beavers and their total anti-elegance on land. An bulky aesthetic of clumsiness that suited the history of the place.
The shape, size and, above all, weight of the figures made it possible to create a work that, with its weight and clumsiness, contrasts with the image of a classic mobile artwork that radiates beauty, lightness and space.
A large part of the work has been to investigate different ways of exposing the objects. The idea of making a mobile felt like an aha experience! Individual parts in a mobile can move in several directions and speeds simultaneously. A perfect medium to illustrate a place where time does not seem to follow a chronological order.
To reinforce the sense of The figures as animals in general and beavers in particular, I added a smaller figure found on my last visit to represent a beaver family with parents, last year's cubs circling around a small cub.

2023