ARTIST STATEMENT:

Integration is my mission. In my art practice I want to integrate things that usually don’t go together. My work often consists of elements either from different cultures or other opposites, such as reality in juxtaposition with fantasy or profanity with the sacred. I believe that integration is a way to make a better world and for the individual to reach a more harmonious life.

Maybe my need to integrate emanates from my background:
My grandfather was a Swedenborg pastor, a kind of mystic, philosophical school that for example pays attention to night dreams. He and my grandmother worked in Egypt for 9 years and my mother and her siblings were raised there. In my grandparents house I explored the wonder of Arabic handicraft and patterns.

My father, on the other hand, in spite of a very traditional Swedish upbringing, became a psycho- analyst, which was rare in Sweden at that time. On top of that my mother became a psychotherapist and therefore Freud and Jung were household gods in my childhood. In my family we often discussed deep psychology and told our dreams at the breakfast table.

I get my motifs from a wide range of different places and mix them together. For example are figurines from a flea market in Sweden placed in a Spanish landscape and cowboys from an old American movie in an arrangement with Arabic ornaments. I often paint symmetrical compositions. I call them kaleidoscope paintings since I as a child really loved the magic of my kaleidoscope. Some of the paintings I also repeat in inverted colours. Together this diptychs creates a nothingness.