TÖRST | THIRST, 2025
a duo exhibition with artist Sigrid Holmwood ︎
THIRST is an exhibition which explores the idea 'is a river alive'. By questioning the capitalist gaze – a gaze that separates humans from nature and reduces nature to a resource, whether it is as a source of power for industry or as something that needs to be saved – Holmwood and Persson want to explore another way of relating: one that acknowledges our bodily entanglement with the river.
Sigrid Holmwood & Linda Persson uses an “alchemical” way of working with and through materials that can illuminate different roles water play part; as a solvent and carrier – through chemical processes such as leaching, dissolution and precipitation, as well as in its movement through our bodies. The artworks traces people's deep and historical relationships with waterways by exploring materials and industries, as well as the water itself.
The art works consists of Holmwood’s 60-metre-long fabric prepared with alder tree bark allowing the iron oxide from the cannonballs once made from mining the iron in the river itself, transform from red to black in contact with the brush against the tannins in the fabric. Holmwoods portrait is of one of the alder trees along the river. The titles refer to old folklore in the area.
Persson has produced several sculptural nodes inside the exhibition that speaks of the water itself, especially in the piece Ån/ river and Mermaids purse, actually displaying water from the local river in the handblown clear glass cylinders.The orange glass vessels ‘Mermaids purse’ were used during the inauguration to collect and carry water to the exhibition.
The other sculptures focus on visualising species that falls under the power languages of invasive or belonging.
In Persson’s piece 'System' a ceramic piece suspended from the ceiling she has placed one of the three cannonballs in a handblown glass bowl inside a plastic bucket with water and vinegar, slowly eroding the cannonball back to its former consistence of iron dust.
In Persson’s piece 'System' a ceramic piece suspended from the ceiling she has placed one of the three cannonballs in a handblown glass bowl inside a plastic bucket with water and vinegar, slowly eroding the cannonball back to its former consistence of iron dust.
