”A studious blind man who had mightily beat his head...to understand those names of light and colours...betrayed one  day that he now  understood what scarlet  signified. Upon which, his friend demanded what scarlet was? The blind man answered, it was like the sound of a trumpet." John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, 1690

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. Most 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.

Recently 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. Lately 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. I can ask myself: “In what way can a forest be melancholic? “ And just like in John Locke’s assertion that the sound of the trumpet is like the color red I can understand that meaning and sense can be separated. Locke’s ability to suggest a generalized synaesthesia (that is the condition where the senses transgress upon one another e.g. seeing sounds) concurs with my approach to create work about the experience of, and attitude towardslandscape. This approach insures it retains a sense of objectless longing, but with a direction – that of arrival.

Sigrid Sandström, New York 10.12.2006