Korean medical plants / Meet the natives

“Swedish Plants” was originally a performance piece in an empty factory building. My aim was to undo a structured and organised way of looking at nature, a de-organization of nature. By drawing all the plants in a Swedish botanical book, one on top of the other, I felt that I was setting the plants free into chaos. It was the act of drawing that was important, not the image. I had no idea what sort of image I would end up with. But as the drawing got blacker and blacker, the complexity of it hit me.

In the Montana version (2007), I worked with Rocky Mountain plants from a book called “Meet the Natives”. I added noxious weeds, to create a sort of plants’ battle on the museum wall. The drawing was done directly on the wall in the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana, as a part of the exhibition “International Language”. In Montana, noxious weeds (i.e. imported European plants) are taking over the prairie and pressing back the native grasses and plants. The European plants are sweet symbols of home from a European point of view, but in this fragile ecosystem they become monstrous threats. Another version of this drawing, “Korean Medical Plants”, was performed in Seoul 2007.

Svenska växter/Swedish Plants, 1995
Meet the Natives and Noxious Weeds, 2007
Korean Medical Plants, 2007
Drawing performance
Galleri Andersson Sandström, Umeå, Holter Museum, Helena, Gana Art Gallery, Seoul

Year1995/2007CategoryPerformance, drawing