Joanne Löfling

“There’s a force field that draws me to explore hidden boundaries, how personal energies arise and operate within them. I draw lines of furrows along the field, growing in wide, parallel arcs. Balancing where it dips down towards the edge of the ditch. My hands search for handles. I plough, I dig and I scrape. Fertilising and spreading nutrition together with the bodies of the machines, sowing in long rows and watching the expectations that follow. The harvest separates the grain from the chaff. I want to make the most of the transformation.”

In Joanne Löfling’s art, earth meets action. The act of ploughing is central. It brings to mind processes such as cultivation and sowing, but also wear and tear. The arch is the recurring form in her sculptures. It seems to span the past, the present and the future, thereby expressing a closeness to life that is constantly in motion due to seasons and climate.

Löfling works from her homestead, a farm and a place where the soil has been cultivated by her family for generations. Today, she grows her own grain, which is ground into flour and mixed with salt and water. This is then combined with jute fabric, oxidising metals and minerals. The mixture becomes a unique material with which to clothe the metal skeletons that Löfling welds herself. This is how the fragrant objects are formed; sculptures or beings. We are invited into a world where tenderness, consolation and existential questions lean towards the forest and the land, the sky and the earth.