A Corner of Home Emma Bäcklund
A CORNER OF HOME
EMMA BÄCKLUND
Published 9 April, 2020
In the days that have passed and the days that are to come, we'll all be spending more time indoors. A Corner of Home collects photographic studies and new works made by artists in their immediate environments; small snapshots of the impulse to create.
Edited by Trine Stephensen and Joanna Cresswell
1. Where are you living at the moment and how has that environment shaped you creatively? Can you tell us about a favourite detail of this place and why?
Emma Bäcklund: I live in Berlin but am visiting Gothenburg, Sweden, where I grew up. I’ve stayed here for two weeks, which is the longest I’ve done so in 13 years. Being here longer has definitely evoked new thoughts and perspectives. During this time I’ve been embroidering, reading, writing, photographing and going through old photos. I try to be creative so I don’t stagnate because of the situation, but also as a basic necessity to keep going with ideas. Using what I have and working with the environment is a starting point. I stay at my mum’s place where I have space for myself. It’s quiet. My favourite parts of it are the bathtub and the boxes with photographs my parents took in the 80s and 90s. Baths and showers equal reinvention to me, and it’s in those spaces I feel most comfortable and safe right now. In a weird way I have a physical sense of having no age in water. When the water disappears, I can feel the weight of the world, literally.
2. How have you looked at the materials of home differently in the past weeks? Are there parts of it that have revealed themselves to you in new ways?
As the body is central in my work, I view the home from the bodies that inhabit and activate it. The sense of bodily limitation in physical space has triggered thoughts of alternate ways of freedom. I have thought a lot about inner images (or after images) – the ones registered by light. One artist I haven’t thought of since 2013 has come to mind again: Uta Barth. I also think of memories. Being in one space with a lack of travel, as mentioned, I have dived into my family photography archive, a form of time travel, if you like. This has enabled visits to memories and events I don’t even remember. Mundane domestic attributes and randomness are discovered, perhaps because of the non-option to press ‘delete’. Viewing photos my parents took when they were my age almost makes us meet in time, boundaries are blurred. The most fragile meeting of all is with myself, as a child.
3. Tell us about how you’ve been using photography lately? What are you making or putting in front of the lens?
Lately I have thought a lot about how our bodies are living mediums through which images are experienced. As active archives we carry inner images that grew from outer ones and vice versa. These images are in constant shift and in conversations with new contexts, as the body is a vessel with powers to metamorphose. So, yes I will look at these images differently now, almost as if I am a tourist in previous lives. I also take new photographs that inevitably merge with the ones I find, a manifestation of the times that bundle together, temporally. These edits and crops subconsciously draw attention to visual interests I have when making my own photographs. I decided to use them together to communicate the strangeness of time, age and different versions of the self and relationships in life. Perhaps time works in these ways, more like a mishmash, more like water.
