Page 92 - VEM ÄR DIN MAMMA

CLAY FROM A FIELD
“I just dropped by to say hello.”
My mother enters the studio, completely unan- nounced, inspecting the suspended sculptures. Not saying a thing. Just gazing, without finding anything. She suddenly spots the small drawing, over there under the shelf, of the baby in the pram.
“Oh, how nice! You should make more of those.”
In the distance I see a shape, meeting your face, with mine. A bodyguard.
A winter’s evening, I’ve booked a room at Vilsta Sporthotell. The guy at reception informs me that “it’s a bit of a walk to Fröslunda. But I’ll lend you this key so you can take a shortcut through the campsite, there’s a gate in the fence on the other side. Just don’t let anyone else in.”
I plough through the snow past the camper vans like illuminated vessels on a white firmament. I find the gate. On the other side there’s a group of teenage girls, stomping around in the snow, wanting to enter as I leave.
“You’ll have to go around.”
I slam the gate shut and continue along the path toward Fröslunda. Their remarks echo behind me. “Nice of you to shut the gate!”, “How rude!”, “Who’s your mother?”
How does one take on such a place, where eve- rything is “within reach”? Perhaps by just keeping both feet firmly on the ground.
My mother collected empty thread bobbins.
She painted them in bright colours and strung them on a coarse piece of string. An excellent toy for a small child. I store her collection in a dinged, blue biscuit tin. The sculpture needs some sup- port to maintain its balance. Mother’s bobbins become part of the spine.
St Martin’s Day, sometime in the early 60’s. Adults rambling on and on around the table... little by little I slide down the chair and under
the tablecloth to sit there, looking at all the feet, listening to the voices, trying to guess which feet are the ones talking, up there.
Can I mould a few hundred kilos of clay, exca- vated from a field between Rönne-river and the bay of Skälderviken?
There’s an inner axis holding the structure together, the structure that’s either my body, or yours. Adding clay until it resembles you. I’m your ‘you’. Subtracting until it comes alive.
How do I carry you on my shoulders, how do I keep you there, without it hurting too much?
The hands are probably most important.
A summer’s evening at the square in Fröslunda. A black backdrop in front of the gangly maple trees, it’s even long enough to provide us a floor. A lot of people pass through. Because for a moment this is the place where the picture lives, as long as we’re looking right at each other.
If you look up at the ceiling, it’s completely filled with flowers, embroidered flowers. Some of them spread onto the sculpture.
Many people believe that bronze statues are mute, but just sit down on the stool, place a hand and an ear against the bronze, and you will surely hear wonderful stories.
It was early spring. I was young. Dad and I were out in the fields. He crouched down, took a hand- ful of earth from the ground and said:
“Look here ‘Lillan’, it lives!”
Astrid Göransson
artist
92