LB°18 — Artists

ARKIV

Ingela Ihrman

Ingela Ihrman (b. in Kalmar, 1985) is an artist based in Malmö.

In a diary entry dedicated to thoughts on the intestine, Ingela Ihrman writes about the flora of the sea and that of the stomach, and about how, for her, gutweed (Ulva intestinalis) makes the link between the two – a slimy return to the sea and to the algae that have managed to retain the sun’s power so that other forms of life may benefit from it. It is about being a landscape, and being in landscape; about belly fat and crude oil – deposits of energy stored in the earth and in the body form the the basis of an extensive artistic exploration that begins in the bowel – a sore spot, and with Wind Within (2018) the Luleå Biennial stages its second outcome. From the study of algae and seagrass on the Koster islands in Bohuslän and a still burgeoning relation to the permacultural activities there, the project now moves into its visual phase, where the gutweed takes the sculptural form of hanging, sprawling bodies. The work may be read as an artistic quest for a new way of relating to both the body and the earth, in which we are encouraged to listen to our intens- tines and allow the stomach to assume its rightful place. Ihrman inspires us to think of ourselves as microscopic infinities: “The stomach is like the cosmos. Both are impossible to grasp, in spite of the fact that the stomach is inside of us, and we are inside of the cosmos.”

In line with Ihrman’s previous works, the barely fathomable aspects of nature are channeled through our own bodies. The work relates to “dark ecology,” a notion that covers all of nature’s more obscure processes – those that take place in microscopic dimensions, in the dark, in the deep, in the repulsive. As a counterpoint to the green, idealised ideas of nature that humans have learned to understand, invariably with ourselves at the centre of the action, dark ecology changes the perspective.

During the Festival of the Night in Korpilombolo, Ihrman will participate with her performance Queen of the Night, on December 1, 2018. Queen of the Night is a performance staging the flowering of a special cactus. As part of The Festival of the Night the public is invited to witness this brief and strange event. Queen of the Night (Selenicereus grandiflorus) is a type of cactus that used to be a common house plant in Sweden. Its buds open late in the evening, only to blossom for a single night (there might be years in between each occurrence, and it is always unpredictable). As the cactus blossoms, it emits a scent reminiscent of orange flowers or vanille. In her work, Ingela Ihrman is interested in ethnobiology, the scientific study of the human relation to nature, and the histories, attributes and myths we project onto it. Her method is at once poetic, absurd and pensive. Traditionally, the flowering of the Queen of the Night is an occasion around which you gather your neighbours. The darkness and slow return of the light, sets the stage for a collective experience of unfolding and withering. Here, the night becomes a magical space, and the blossoming of the flower a condensed life cycle for us to observe.

Ingela Ihrman (b. in Kalmar, 1985) is an artist based in Malmö.

Thanks to Malmö Konstmuseum.