An aging spine. Public comission for the city of Gothenburg. A four meter tall obelisk called The Spine installed outside Kviberg School.

Photos Lola Halifa Legrand

A site specific commission for a new-built extension of Hallands Museum of Art, Sweden. Previously being a County Museum, it holds a large collection of cultural historical objects, such as old craft tools and excavated objects from the stone- and iron age. The commission - a flooring for the museum café and auditorium - is based on the museum collection. The flooring in the old building is made of limestone, rich on fossils. Historically, pedagogical tours showing the fossils, was an integrated part of the museum’s daily operation. With a flooring as the ‘canvas’ six large ‘excavations’ is created, containing pewter casts of original objects from the collection. The excavations are filled up with coal powder and transparent resin.

Combined bollard and bike-stand commission for ArkDes, Museum of Architecture, Sweden

Public commission for the birthing center at Södersjukhuset hospital, Stockholm Sweden

Two river sculptures produced during ‘Residency In Nature’ in Småland Sweden. The sculptures are made from blue-clay dug up in the area and the pieces are based on a 700 year old local myth about female fertility rituals, taking place in the rivers around the area.

This is anthracite. The black rock gleams in sunshine to attract crows. As the highest metamorphic state of coal, its moniker is crow coal. I stumbled upon anthracite on a hike by Loch Long during an artist residency in the western part of Scotland. The glittery black stone was lying on the side of the road with a seemingly precious appearance. Had I found a gem? When I returned to the residency main building, a person detected it as anthracite and concluded that it probably had fallen off the back of a truck during transport. The journey of moss post mortem: If moss happens to decay in an acidic environment without oxygen, it becomes peat. Peat is the accumulated energy generated from the moss’ photosynthesis. Buried far below ground, peat will be exposed to the heat and pressure from Earth's crust and transform into coal. That’s a metamorphosis. Coal is fuel, a rock you set on fire, and all the energy and carbon dioxide the moss kept in store is released. But if you let it continue its metamorphosis, the coal turns into anthracite which later becomes graphite. With every transformation the molecular structure changes. Anthracite glitters, coal doesn’t. Graphite is arranged in very thin layers, each line drawn with your pen is a layer of molecules. Graphite transforms into diamond, the hardest natural material we know and the end of the journey of moss. A year after my hike by Loch Long I created two sculptures for an exhibition at Gothenburg Museum of Art. They would be around two meters tall and made from large blocks of anthracite. Close to Brecon Beacons National Park, in the south of Wales, I found an anthracite mine. The people working there had a profound knowledge of ecology and put a large amount of work into restoring ecosystems in closed-down pits. The crows were there too. I called the sculptures ‘Pressure’ to emphasize the unfathomable weight that causes a metamorphosis. Based on traditional bridge construction, wedges of anthracite were placed in an archlike composition. Nothing but the pressure from each wedge stacked on top of each other, held the construction together. In hindsight, I can judge that the project was a bad idea. The thin layer of black dust, which made the museum space resemble a coal mine during the set-up of the exhibition, caused a lot of annoyance amongst the technicians. For a year after the show I paid extra storage to keep the pieces. When it was time for me to move to another country, I was so fed up by the look of the crates, that I gave it to a man with a vintage steam-engine boat, who would use it for fuel.

The sculpture, depicting the topography of the Tyrollean mountains, was conceived through transferring files from Google Earth into a 3D program. The topography was later cut out in a cnc-router in glass and the composite material Jesmonite. The sculpture was accompanied by a 4 minute video. Filmed in a quarry, it fictitiously narrates the origin of the sculpture. Created in collaboration with Swarovski.

The Materiality of a Natural Disaster. The 12 minute documentary takes place in Fukushima, Japan, a year after the Tohoku Daiichi Powerplant disaster. In the wake of the accident, the government evacuated a 30 km area and put up an exclusion zone around the powerplant. I visited the rice farmer Naoto Matsumura, who had refused to move from his home and was now the only man still living within the exclusion zone. Fukushima had mainly been an agricultural area but when the soil became contaminated by radiation, the agriculture was wiped out. I made a documentary about Matsumuras life and together we dug up soil from his old rice fields. From the soil I created 5 sculptures with the typology of food ves- sels. The shapes of the vessels were hinting to the specific produce from the area. The idea was for them to work as symbols, loaded with the narrative of the area, as an allegory to the devastating event.