My practice takes place in the wake of grief, in a convulsive need to remember and the simultaneous need for release. I am interested in loss and how it relates to domestic labor as well as materialization of memory and materials such as laundry, waste, photographs, papers and binders.
There is something similar about the way time moves in grief and while performing house work. You could describe its progression from point A to point B, whether it is hanging the laundry or deciding on funeral arrangements. But movement in these matters is not linear: there is transition rather than progression. Grieving and house work are time-consuming and often both go unrecognized.
There is infrastructure enabling rememberance, such as collections of photographs and birth and marriage certificates, which can be sorted into folders and binders. Looking through such materials can feel as if the divide in time and space is narrowing, making life and death simultaneous, while structuring it can serve as a way of resurrecting a dependable linearity in grief’s vortex.
I am also interested in the material conditions that set forgetting in motion. The cleansing of a body, or a space, is an exercise in forgetting. The physicality of decay, its stench, seems an intimacy which most often cannot be shared. In the drum of a washing machine clothes cease to smell of yesterday’s effort, stop carrying the traces of traffic exhaust and sloppily eaten lunches. We put away the smell of our own decay. But every time textiles are washed free of stains and smells they also release a little bit of their pigment into the water, gradually draining the textiles of color. Eventually worn out textiles become light as bone or an overexposed image: dying and dyeing.
Images:
01.
Installation view of Machine for making portraits and Portrait of K in Stockholm och Barcelona, November twentytwentyfour, Galleri Mejan (2025). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger
02.
Machine for making portraits (2025) Washing machine washing constantly for as long as piece is exhibited, red t-shirt, detergent, motor, plastic and steel, 105 x 58 x 80 cm. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger
