STORIES OF THE LAND

As an artist, I’m invited by the culture department of Region Örebro län to make a body of work during an artist residence of a total of 7 weeks. I´m a landscape researcher and try to understand the daily reality of the processed landscape and explore experiences and memories. The traces of cultivation in the surface of land talk about the relationship between nature and inhabitants. The stories of the land I depict in hiking maps and feltscapes.

The location of my residency is on one of the farms in Långbyn, a small hamlet north of one of the largest cities in Sweden, Örebro. This city is part of Närke, landskap (province) lying mostly in the administrative län (county) of Örebro, south-central Sweden. An important feature of the landscape in central and South Sweden is the geomorphological landscape relief of joint aligned valleys classified by the geographer Rudberg in the 1960s as fissure valley landscape, sprickdalar. In these valley bottoms are elongated lakes and one of these is Langen after which is Långbyn is probably named.

In my barn studio I depict the landscape of my residency in a cartographic way in feltscapes made of fibers of Långbyns land. With wool of Helsingerfår and other fibers of the land I make felt, several layers of wool are treated with soap and water so that fibers intertwine. When making the felt layers I investigate how man and nature have brought the landscape into culture. For the feltscapes for Långbyns land I use as a basis a historically sketched map from the Lantmäteriet archives (1840s). This map consists of several parts and was made in the fields by a cartographer from the past.