Exhibitions & projects
I am the moss! For the summer's grand exhibition, the entire exhibition space has been taken over by The Great Swamp, and the artist Amanda Cardell has invited nature as a guest, acting as its medium.
The exhibition becomes a being of its own, a landscape where it is about the proportions and scale of the place, and the feelings they evoke. It is about physical movement and sensation, when nothing is stable, when the ground yields, when the state of the world is unpredictable and we are all undergoing a state of transformation.
In Småland, a few miles northwest of Vandalorum lies Store Mosse National Park, southern Sweden's largest area of bogs, marshes, and quagmires. This place constitutes a unique landscape, and an important wetland area, where Sweden's national parks are doing an incredibly valuable job with expertise, knowledge dissemination, and management of the site. In the southern part of Kävsjön lies an area called The Great Quagmire, which has given its name to the entire exhibition.
Cardell has been working on the theme for a longer time, visiting several sites and wandering around Store Mosse National Park, gathering information, deepening her understanding through both literature, facts, and myths. It concerns climate and wetlands, drainage and economic interests, revised knowledge, nature's resources, and organic material - and methane which can actually self-ignite.
Peat, sphagnum, water, mass, and infinitely much time. Peat extraction, peat harvesting, the knowledge of the origin of everything. The swamp gas that becomes will-o'-the-wisps and light spirits in folklore, collectively creating a feeling that everything flows.
Cardell wants to create a charge and presence in the room, through several large-scale monumental works that fill the space from floor to ceiling. She has shaped the great quagmire primarily with fiber-based textile materials such as wool, linen, hemp, and viscose. It is fluff, down, coarse stalks, and prickly straws that cover the floor. Daylight filters down through hundreds of meters of painted paper strips from the skylights. In the room lie dyed large peat-like blocks of terry cloth that serve as seating poufs for the visitors.
Furthermore, Amanda Cardell has dug into the archive and searched for nature's voice among graphic sheets from a selection of older artist colleagues; here you can take part in some of the treasures of Småland’s Art Archive. As a secret guest, the light spirits have sneaked into a corner.
