Tillsammans och Isär
(together and apart) 2025

Tillsammans och Isär (together and apart) contemplates the nature of family and home and how our cultural inheritances shape the ways we navigate what it means to belong. Responding to my own mixed Swedish heritage, the work negotiates between memory and fabulation. It seeks to address the intimate strangeness of being both at home and removed from it.

Stuck between the desire to fix one’s memories of the past and their inevitable unravelling, this work explores the dualistic nature of the image as both creator and destroyer. As we fumble through the chaos of existence I look toward the camera as a means of questioning what it means to be – what do images tell us of ourselves and the world? Guided by the curiosity of my own lived experience as someone whose identity is given through a certain displacement, I find a strange comfort in images. Never whole, never solved, leaky vessels of meaning that nevertheless fill us to the brim.

The vivid Australian landscape of Far North Queensland blends with Swedish cultural motifs, inherited objects and recreated scenes from childhood stories. I think about the experience of my mother in contrast to my own. How my sister who no longer speaks to her family complicates the picture. The unseen but somehow inherited anxieties of family where one either goes deeper into the fray or abandons the ship altogether. In this series, image and memory become each other’s shadow.