Soil under the nails, a brushed coat
Mutual Plumage
Jag vidrör
After a year of field studies in attentive interaction with my hens, I have witnessed how a interspecies trust can emerge through closeness and gentle contact. When a hen quietly preens her feathers beside me, it becomes clear how time and proximity shape relationships: I feel her weight, she feels my hands.
Through painting and sculpture, I depict encounters between bodies in motion, where two beings, despite differences in form and language, find ways of cooperating. Trust is built by remaining present, by listening without dominating, and by allowing the other’s pace to influence one’s own. I am fascinated by this everyday presence and try to understand her through attentiveness, by digging and scratching in the same soil. What her interest in me looks like, I can never fully know; I can only begin from the calm that exists between us.
The sculptural paintings Soil under the nails, a brushed coat and Mutual Plumage are based on photographs taken during my field studies, in which, through spending time with the hens, I sought moments where we seemed balanced together and worked from those encounters. In the works, a meeting emerges where the boundary between myself and the other becomes porous. The brushstrokes move between control and dissolution, and in the steel sculpture Jag vidrör, my hand and the hen’s merge into a surreal yet exploratory and non-hierarchical form. For me, the metal and the painting create a tension when united, like two individuals within one body, where the metal carries and the painting offers a gaze.
In physical touch, a form of knowledge emerges that cannot be accelerated. Time becomes not only a measure, but a material. In this slowness, something fragile yet enduring grows forth: a shared presence in which two species temporarily overlap and open themselves to mutual understanding.
@rosapirog
sandraakerberg.se
sandramolndal@gmail.com