The farmer of the underworld
This body of work started in 2006 as a tribute to the earthworm, working in silence under our feet. The first attempt was a gate, as a portal between the vegetable garden and composting area at Wij trädgårdar in Ockelbo, Sweden.
A tribute to our helper of processing the earth making farming possible and digesting all dead things.
An often neglected creature that is essential to our life on the ground.
The gate pillars have become a body of work that I hav been working on since 2006.
For kunstmaand amland in 2009 I decided to make free worms coming out of the ground
As I packed them in their case I discovered they were exactly my height, laying myself down in the transport box I could have been in my own last resting place.
This started two more work sculptures, but this times worms in boxes, perhaps in their coffins or parts of a curiosity collection.
Standing leaned against the wall as dead bandits on display in western movies or lying on the floor exhibited, on lit de parade.
The ephermality of life, the inevitability of death and the processes of rotting and consumption were topics on my mind at the time
The latest installation, three short maggot-like worms in a sofa is called Still Life – or Nature Morte an image as well as a statement – we consider things to be dead dead or alive from our perspective, maggots from another. Steel as material can seem dead – it’s not, it’s always on its was back to iron oxide, reacting with oxygen.
There is still life eaven in what we would consider death.
