In time

Victoria andersson

4 june – 26 september 2021

In Time, 2021
Embroidery, textile collages, single-channel video installation sound, soft sculptures.

In her exhibition In Time, Victoria Andersson composes over white or black textile backgrounds, a series of reflections about time and its passing. Nature, something we assume, is an endless resource has been a constant presence in her work, however, in the context of this exhibition, a sense of threat or even emergency lingers. A “caution ribbon” or a warning tape made in textile marks the site. It suggests that something has happened. This sensation is underlined by the Morse code sound that fills the space: SOS, SOS, SOS… Help! The clock is ticking. The sound comes from her video Tiden Lider (a play on words as it can mean both “time suffers” and “time goes on”). In the animated video, a needle moves in a circular motion erasing beads, laid out like a clock, one by one as it passes. The Morse code SOS, the universal sign for help, is also repeated in the pattern formed by the beads in their layout. And fire, as an urgent metaphor, expands in all directions and in different compositions.

With a series of collages made in tulle, she explores the effects of light, its refraction into prisms of color; the opacity of clouds, the black on black of a new moon, and the warm tones of a sunset, or the orange reflections of a forest burning. Like a moth towards the flame, we seem enchanted and thus helpless by our destruction. SOS the clock is ticking.

In the work Heartwood, the ring of a tree—a clock of another much slower tempo—is embroidered in black thread over black textile. The wood ring seems to bleed, or is it perhaps oil that drips? Or tears? From a witness saddened by the destruction, it records? Her work asks the existential questions of our time.

In the middle of the room, two large embroideries depict a barren landscape. Few treetops, like the tip, if an iceberg, allow us to imagine the scope of the destruction at ground level left by clear-cutting, deforestation, the industrialization of forests, and excessive timber consumption; Forests are burning, and what Victoria Andersson portrays in her painstakingly slow process of embroidering, records it, like in the rings of a tree, almost as if a second could be equated with a stitch. The stitches here, like in the clock, only seem to reinforce that time is out.

More information can be found in the Folder

About the artist

Victoria Andersson is born in Kiruna, now living in Luleå. She studied Textiles at HDK – Valand Academy for art and design in Gothenburg. Victoria has had various solo and group exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In her work, time and trees are a returning thematic.