2. there is a forest and so we sell firewood text
2025
Accompanying exhibition text for the show of the same title
There is a field around the back and an orchard in the front. The neighbours cows are moved to the neighbouring paddock every month or so, and thus the flies multiply. There is a greenhouse where tomatoes and figs are grown, and the garlic is dried and braided in the summer for the winter stores. From her days growing up on a farm in Österlen, Gry Mattsson paints from a piecing together of nostalgia. Now studying at Umeå Konsthögskola, her parents and siblings, the barns corners and farm stocks become subject to her washed colours and the patchwork of shadows and light that she moves between on her canvases. Her practice, a calling from family life within rurality. How the children of farmers look out at the landscape.
While the countryside is romantic in the summer when the sun stays high, and in the winter when snow lies thick, there is a pounding of work that beats beneath it daily. How to put food on the table? How to make a life from the land? Samuel Krantz’s work ‘You Can Rest When You’re Dead’ wipes the words straight from our grandparents' lips. Coming from a printmaking practice at Östra Grevie, Krantz has introduced performance in his works here to mirror his lineage of working class labourers in Småland, in motion and physicality. There is always work to be done. More callouses to collect, more blisters to burn, more sweat to wipe away. It is the working class sentiment. The medallion given to those who travel gravel roads.
But what is to be done when the trucks drive far off and all that is left for our working class families is abandoned mines and forestry tracks. When a once industrial town is abandoned for a new port… Can one stay? Sustain? Or must we travel alongside the pace and whims of industry for the sake of our livelihoods? In a photographic series, Claudia Munro documents the ‘after’ of the working class. No longer in childhood or in prime physical labour, but rather where all of the pent up energy dissipates to when there is no longer anywhere to place it. An emptiness perhaps. A longing? Studying at Malmö Art Academy, Munro's practice circles around labour in various forms here in Sweden, as well as at home in New Zealand. Calling on the remnants of these spaces to speak softly. What has been here and what remains still.
‘There is a Forest, and so we Sell Firewood’ fixes the working class life to chronological levels, spoken from the mouths of three children of the countryside. Land as a resource and a life source. What can we borrow from it to give back to one another? Where we began, where we are, and where we may have to go. And where may we meet on gravel roads, to begin the cycle again.