Angeli Blombäck

“My work is site-specific, using oil painting. My art is based on – and revolves around – the island on the Norrbotten coast where I spent my childhood summers. In my work, I reflect on the traces that this harsh, contrastful and ever-changing landscape has left in me.”

In Angeli Blombäck’s paintings there is an island, and on the island is a bog. A landscape where time is not counted in seconds or years, but in slow transformation over the course of decades. Here, the ground carries memories of father, grandmother, grandfather. Those who constructed houses, built, dreamed. But Blombäck also remembers through the plants, the light, the cottage where her childhood moved through the rooms. Everything bears traces of what once was, and what still is, but different. A little quieter.

Blombäck notices what shifts, and she feels what changes. With a reverence towards the secretive nature of the bog, the bog that is slowly losing itself and becoming something else through land uplift. As the ground rises up from the water, Blombäck documents this while at the same time paying homage to the place. This is a depiction of changes, but also a whisper about life itself. We will all disappear, but in the vegetation that still sprouts, hope grows for what lies ahead.

Blombäck’s painting stands in dialogue with the nature romantics, but extends further – into the mysticism where place becomes presence, and what has been meets what will be. Here, the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s thoughts about time and place echo as a deep sense of belonging with the past and the future.

When painting captures a place so that its very spirit can be discerned, a feeling beyond mere words arises. Perhaps it touches upon what we constantly seek in our existence.