SHORT BIO
In her practice Cecilia Hedlund works with the human relationship to nature. She works out in the landscape. Through researching into the human attitude to nature, reading Philosopher Bruno Latour, Researchers Alexander von Humboldt, Physicist Karen Barad in order to understand the human relationship to nature in greater depth, she also uses her practice to try natural processes of erosion, charcoaling, composting, oxidisation, and so on.
PROPOSED WORK
For me walking is about understanding the land, and not just traveling from one site to another. By walking I can gain an insight in how the landscape is formed as my feet carry me to where my interest leads me, and that is not necessarily the quickest route. Compared to traveling by bike or car, walking allows me to discover the landscape more in detail. Walking also allows me to perceive and experience nature by the use of my senses like sight, smell, hearing, touching. I find that when I start walking, my thoughts are all over the place, but by walking on and finding my own pace, my head is cleared and I can perceive the landscape to its full capacity. I use walking daily together with my dog to reach a certain state of mind that gives me space in my head to be creative. I create while I walk, and I walk to create.
If possible during my stay at the artist-in-residence, I would be interested in collaborating with other artists at the residency to do a sound walk based on sounds and stories picked up along the path or to do collective paintings and drawings made from and during the walks and from memories of the walks.
If collaboration is not possible on making artwork, then I would love to do the above work on my own. In that case I would also like to use photography in
the painting process, abstracting impressions during the walks, painting those abstract impressions and then photographing the paintings abstracting the same paintings, and so on.
Studio:28
Dates: Oct
When I arrived at the residency I had an idea about a collaboration with a fellow residency artist, but was open to what kind of collaboration that might be.
Cliff Andrade kindly agreed to do a collaboration. He made a drawing on
one of his walks for this purpose.
After a day's reflection on a solitary walk, wandering around in the woods of Björkö, I decided I would use Cliff's drawing as a guide for my coming walks.
I traced the outlines of his drawing, and used those outlines as a guide or a path to walk on in the landscape, by putting my tracing on a physical map. Obviously there were some topographical issues, but it was also rewarding to introduce that level of chance on my walks, negotiating the space around me but always trying to follow the outline.
During my walks in the traces of the outline of Cliff's drawing, I stopped at intervals to make charcoal rubbings of lichen and moss, and to do my own drawings of shapes of light and shadow that I saw along my wanderings.
The charcoal rubbings were made with pieces of charcoal that I picked up from an extinct fire that I passed as I was walking. Charcoaling is a process that
I use repeatedly in my practice, both to make charcoaled sculptures and to use the charcoal itself for drawing.
