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Home and Family (An Ordinary Life), installation with objects and 110 paintings on paper 2024

My mother heard voices and had delusions. She was always ill, even though on a superficial level she was able to fool people into trusting her competence as a housewife. Could it be that Mum heard similar voices to those that artist Hilma af Klint was in contact with? Perhaps they could communicate with each other across time and space? The former as an insane person and the latter as a spiritualist activist. The hallucinations of the mentally ill meet a representative of alternative thinking in a fictional room that opens up to both dark and light spiritual imaginations. Mom's inner experiences were predominantly dark. Her permanent illness dissolved the boundaries between what is credible and what is insane fantasy.

My father provided for the family and, together with my older brother, came to represent continuity and sanity in contrast to my mother's psychotic state. Dad, on the other hand, would collapse in epileptic seizures and could suddenly appear completely absent and silent. Over the years, he became increasingly withdrawn and depressed. Son of farmers, who had lost both his parents before the age of fifteen, a ship's boy who sailed to America, climbed the rigging and the yardarm of a large sailing boat without fear, and a few years later, during the war, became a torpedo seaman, then a policeman and a devout Christian. Finally, he was transferred to office duty because of his illness. He was no weakling. But despite that, he slowly broke down because of an unflattering fate and his own ambivalence. Mom and dad belonged to the category of traffic victims presented in the margins.

The installation "Home and Family (An Ordinary Life)" has been acquired by Moderna Museet, Sweden 2024.