Child's Gaze | Västerviks konstförening | Västerviks konstförening

1. The large works are places in an inner landscape – a magical-realist archipelago of memories from the artist's upbringing in the hilly terrain of Huskvarna. Here, fragments of light, ravines, and streams carrying a particular presence are captured.

2. The small works often zoom in on individual children and their aura – moments where psyche and body language reveal a world of curiosity, dreams, and vulnerability. They can also

The places of childhood form an inner landscape – fragments of light, terrain, and moods that live on. For me, this landscape is in Huskvarna, where I spent my first eighteen years. The hilly terrain, with its ravines, slopes, and streams, as well as the shifting light throughout the day, carries a particular presence. In this exhibition, I take my starting point in this landscape and in new paintings that explore how the childhood way of seeing the world can live on – as a quiet counterweight to the noise and overwhelming flux of our time.

The motifs have emerged gradually, through an intuitive process where memory images, personal and found photographs, and other visual sources merge until the right mood arises. The painting becomes a place where document and imagination mix, where new narratives can take shape.

It helps me approach things that cannot be captured directly: inner images, bodily memories, elusive moods. I work with acrylic paint in thin, transparent layers – a method resembling watercolor. I rarely mix white into the paint, which gives the pigments a particular clarity.

The paint has a life of its own. It flows, runs, bleeds. It's about being present, listening, not controlling too much. Sometimes everything changes because of a detail – a movement, a shift – until the painting begins to speak with its own voice.