You Always Find Another Womb to Grow, 2025

Watercolors, colored pencils, and ink on paper

14 x 21 cm 

Project: Foreign Object, 2026

Foreign Object has, from the beginning, been less concerned with capturing picturesque Nordic landscapes and more with articulating a persistent inner condition: alienation. The frozen lakes, the faint winter light, and the open fields are recognizable in their appearance, but each time the dark, pyramid-like form enters, the scene is displaced and made uneasy. The form does not blend in. It resists assimilation. It remains a distinct, opaque presence, an object that unsettles the very idea of belonging.

My working method, Sleeping as a Method, connects this foreign presence to unspoken mental and emotional layers. By repeatedly drawing figures and symbols drawn from dreams and nightmares linked to trauma and war, I allow unconscious memories to take physical form. Through this process, the pyramid becomes neither a symbol of memory nor a nostalgic marker, but a visible trace of trauma, displacement, and unassimilated difference.

Placing these forms within Nordic nature challenges conventional associations between landscape and home, belonging and identity. In many artistic traditions, landscape is tied to harmony, identity, or nostalgia. In my work, that expectation breaks down. Alienation becomes spatial. The dark form does not conquer the site, but coexists within it in a way that is stubborn and uneasy. The tension remains unresolved.

At the same time, the project has been personally demanding. Translating trauma into painting or sculpture does not automatically produce healing. Yet there is a therapeutic dimension in giving concrete, external form to unspoken memories. By shaping inner conflicts into visible form, I seek to confront, rather than suppress, what remains unresolved.

In the end, I am not looking for resolution in this work. My aim is to present difference, dissonance, and a refusal to disappear. I position myself, and the foreign object, not as a visitor longing to belong, but as someone asserting the right to remain unassimilated, visible, resistant, and persistent. I hope the exhibition invites the viewer to remain within this discomfort, and to recognize that coexistence does not always require fusion.

Supported by the City of Gothenburg.