Sigrid Sandström turns changing weather into soft, shifting paintings: the artist in conversation with Sofia Hallström for Elephant.
There is something in the suddenness and unpredictability of the British weather that feels like an apt metaphor for the moment we are living through. A morning of warmth and cloudless skies punctured by an afternoon of gusty winds and shift in pressure. It is this quality of abrupt alertness that Swedish painter Sigrid Sandström has reached for in naming her new exhibition at Perrotin London. “A squall is a sudden wind, a sudden force coming in,” she explains. “Another word might be ‘gust,’ but ‘squall’ also carries another meaning: this cry or warning call birds make to one another. It has that alarming, non-lingual quality, like a sound that isn’t quite communication but signals alertness.”
That preverbal signal is precisely what these paintings attempt to capture. Moving through the two large gallery rooms, the exhibition has a serenity to it, undercut by a low-frequency unease and an atmosphere of imminence. The paintings somehow manage to be both quiet and urgent. Sandström paints with the canvas flat, flooding diluted acrylic pigments across the cotton surface so that the paint spreads, seeps and pools according to her movements. Cerulean blues bleed into yellow ochres. Soft, atmospheric grounds give way to confidently and precisely placed circles of red moons or punctuation marks that help both the painter and viewer navigate the shifting terrain. “They let you slip between scales,” she explains. “They could be something small and graphic, or they could imply the vastness of a moon or celestial body.”
This willingness to surrender control in the studio is a carefully constructed relationship with chance. “I never know exactly what colour the paint will dry into,” she says. “They develop almost like analogue photographs. Over time, they make themselves.” The hand involved is fast and physical, but the drying is glacially slow, sedimenting pigment in layers that accumulate like geological strata. Sandström has long worked with double-sided canvases, turning failed paintings over to discover that the paint bleeding faintly through on the reverse is often more compelling than the front. “I’m drawn to that out-of-focus quality, that misty, atmospheric feeling,” she says. “What you see is like a faint mirage.” She uses silicate paint that rises into sparkle only during drying, invisible to her while she works. Surprise, she says, is what keeps her interest alive. “If the painting surprises me, I hope that surprise reaches the viewer.”
The works in Squall resist easy classification. They are abstract paintings, but Sandström has always thought in terms of landscape, or something adjacent to it. “Maybe they’re mindscapes or earthscapes, skyscapes,” she offers. There is something of the Swedish landscape running in the paintings. Forests of birch and pine trees, a cool green hush that feels removed from human activity. Light that in summer barely dips below the horizon, lending the landscape an air of perpetual, luminous suspension. There is a serenity to the landscape that is not comforting exactly, but vast and mysterious. In the paintings, there is no horizon line against which to orient yourself. Instead it is an almost dizzying encounter, one removed from perspective. The result is less a view of a landscape than the experience of being inside one.
Walking into the exhibition space, visitors encounter a frieze of paintings that has been arranged so that visitors moving through the gallery travel right to left, against the direction in which Western eyes naturally read. The disorientation is deliberate, shaped by Sandström’s longstanding engagement with Asian scroll painting of early Chinese horizontal scrolls and Japanese screens from the Kamakura and Heian periods. Fra Angelico’s small narrative friezes, encountered on a recent visit to Florence, left their mark on Sandström too, as did the classical Chinese gardens of Suzhou.
And then there is the climate catastrophe. Sandström has no desire to be didactic or polemic. But she is clear that landscape and ecological crises are now inseparable. “If you discuss landscape, you can’t ignore what we’re doing to it,” she says. “We’re in a dramatic time.” Twenty years ago she travelled extensively in the Arctic, painting places that no longer look as she recorded them. The glaciers she observed are diminishing. Rachel Carson was documenting environmental collapse [in her book Silent Spring] in the early 1960s, she points out. What was once visible only in data is now clear to see. “The clock,” she says simply, “is ticking.”
What Sandström refuses to do is place the human at the centre of this reckoning. There are no figures in these paintings. Borrowing a formulation from the poet Ocean Vuong, she hopes her paintings function like a torch held pointing outward. Not illuminating the self but casting light on whatever lies beyond the frame. “I don’t want them to declare who I am,” she says. “I want a contemplative way of looking, not a specific narrative.” Painting for Sandström is then an act of attention directed outward, toward a world waiting to see whether we are listening.
