Among the Branches

Solo exhibition (2025)
Kulturhuset Kåken, Gothenburg, Sweden

What does it mean to look at a tree, knowing it has its own way of knowing - one our senses may never reach? What does it mean to encounter something that neither demands our understanding nor offers a sense of belonging, yet still alters the world and how we perceive it?

Among the Branches is a series of monochrome watercolors exploring the space between human perception and non-human life, and our human attempt to bridge the gap between them. The paintings begin with trees, but they are not representations - rather, they are what remains after the attempt - and the failure - to reach across.

I work in monochrome to remove the emotional charge of color. The blackness emerges as an active, unfathomable field, and the resistance of the granular pigment becomes part of the work - both materially and as a symbol of the trees' resistance to being translated.

The works offer no answers. They ask: what does it mean to remain with the incomprehensible, without romanticizing or mystifying it? What remains when we try to witness a world that does not need to be seen or understood in order to be respected? The paintings testify to distance, but also to an entanglement we can never fully extricate ourselves from. The tree, the pigment, the hand, and the water are part of an entanglement where every attempt to understand is also a way of being affected.

What you see is not the tree itself, but a trace of the relationship between us—and of the attempt to reach across the divide.