My art practice is engaged with how space - specifically landscape - is understood as a concept, a physical site and as an emotional experience. The complexity of spatial awareness has led my practice to take a variety of forms, with the mediums used varying from project to project. The past few years recently I have used film, video, sculpture/installation and painting. However, I primarily see myself as a painter. In painting one is confronted with an already reduced, abstracted reality (2D instead of 3D), which can be utilized as a tool to dissect and reconsider what kind of space I would want to engage in. The medium itself (liquid paint) also allows me to slow down my thinking according to the speed of the actual paint application creating a process that is patient and stubborn, waiting for the right moment when things fall into place. Yet as much as this process is amorphous I rigidly edit which I slowly resolve towards clarity.

My fascination with the actual experiences of a place, be it in real life or constructed in my painting, also incorporates the components that enable this experience. The different aspects that contribute to the experience of a place, such as one’s memory, perceptual senses, cultural heritage, as well as its climate and geography are all crucial for me as inspirations and remain influential to my painting practice.

These interests have provoked me to work with issues around property ownership. This deeply rooted, yet mildly absurd desire to claim stake and own a part of the earth’s surface truly fascinating to me. Ownership requires commitment, demands loyalty and yet the yearning to dwell speaks of an urge for safety, or of an arrival after an erratic journey.

In my work I have often included what can be characterized as ambiguous signifiers. Frequently black flags have figured in the paintings and in the video work. The incidences of these in the work have a pronounced intentional sense but its capacity to signify is left somewhat uncertain: referencing, for instance, both the flags used to mark food deposits in polar exploration and the black flag of anarchism. In a way this process can be seen as an idiosyncratic re-alignment where rationality is not resolved nor is it necessary the final destination. This approach insures it retains a sense of objectless longing, but with a direction – that of arrival.

My recent paintings are created without a preconceived notion of a given place, and neither are they illustrative of imaginary places. Instead, while working in the studio, the immediacy of the painting practice establishes a place, in and of itself.  This notional place develops through the haptic process of painting. The cumulative activity of adding layer-upon-layer, is the evidential aftermath of mental engagement which in turn insinuates and provokes the next painterly response.  Thereby this active place of meaning is redolent with discoveries and surprises.  Each painting is a visual moment where the plasticity of space is tested and challenged by the painted surface and vice verse. Recurrent in the paintings are areas of under-determinacy; white expanses that could be suggestive of beginnings or as reconsiderations: literal blank sheets.

Sigrid Sandström, November 21, 2008