Feeding The Rat
ISSUES, Stockholm
2025

Time has been an ongoing theme in my work. The previous two shows I had at ISSUES focused on cosmic time and historical time. This one is centered on geological time. That is not incidental. I’m a dedicated mountain climber, which immerses me intimately in the geological environment, including ancient rock formations, sky-kissing peaks, frigid glaciers and lush valleys. Through that, I experience first-hand what is called deep time.

According to modern physics, time does not pass uniformly everywhere. All processes are slower closer to the core of the Earth, and faster the further away they occur. A clock on a mountaintop moves faster than the same clock at sea level. Relativity explains this interplay between time and gravitational fields. I’m not a physicist, but what is hard not to notice when I’m enveloped by geology, in particular at higher altitudes, is how deep time unravels itself. My subjective experience is that all temporal states seem to merge. Past, present, and future become one. Geological phenomena speaks not only of what has happened, but also of what is, and what will happen.

That notion prompted me to make the work in this show.

The bottom-most layer in the paintings on view was made in direct contact with what they represent: rock surfaces. Bleached linen fabrics were glued onto rock slabs, mainly granite, and then spray painted. That imprinted the linen with a pattern from the three-dimensional texture of the rock. The pattern was preserved when the linen was stretched flat.

The images created read as totally abstract or totally representative of said rock surfaces. The foundational concern you are forced to confront as a painter is that of field vs image, surface vs depth. It’s this enduring dichotomy that makes the medium eternally engaging and challenging. This was a major reason why I returned to painting after not having done so for a long time.

Photographs of mountain environs familiar to me served as starting points for the images in the top layer of the paintings. They were printed onto the base layer in two colors, by method of woodcut and silkscreen. The colors were selected so that their tone and hue would match the lightest and darkest colors in the bottom layer, so as not to give either layer more authority or precedence over the other.

The exhibition title is borrowed from a seminal biography about the relentless and iconoclastic British mountaineer, Mo Anthoine. The metaphor refers to the thirst certain individuals develop for adventures that test the boundaries of one’s mental and physiological prowess, and has since become a staple term for such exploits in alpinism. One part of me gets my thirst quenched by mountain climbing, but another part craves the fulfillment found in making art. Painting in particular can do that with much immediacy.

The series of small sculptures in this show are titled, “Feed.” The components in each work are made from a mold of a rock and then “skewered” like kabobs in a sequence. While the paintings repeat the same rock shape motif through several canvases, here one rock form has been reproduced in multiplicity within each sculpture.

Multiple, simultaneous temporal states is an aspect of deep time that I have experienced in the mountains.

Multiple forms of one time.

Multiple forms of one rock are the formal constituents of the works.

There are a finite amount of things that semantics are good for, and where they cease to be of use (as here in this text), poetics or visual art can sometimes close the gap.

Planet of the Apes
2024-2025
Rabbit skin glue, bleach, spray paint, plasisol ink, acrylic, woodcut and silkscreen on linen, 49” x 40”/124,5 x 101,6 cm