Reflections on a Collaboration Uniting Mothers Around Sámi Traditions

Carola Grahn, a South Sámi artist working in Malmö, first exhibited Mother and Sun (2019) when her child was one year old, and then again when he was three. Since January, as part of ‘Earthworks’ – a group show on art and ecology at Bergen Kunsthall –Mother and Sun, 5 Years (2024) has been shared with the public for a third time. The work consists of cross-layered stacks of birch wood set in two piles, one reaching the height of Carola with arms stretched up high, and the other as tall as her son (or ‘sun’) in the same stance. In each iteration of the artwork, Carola has collaborated with another mother in producing the piece. I am the third mother invited to take part.

Motherhood is a subject I’ve been obsessed with since it ate me alive and puked me back out with the arrival of my first child in 2017. Since then, I’ve been trying to piece together who I once was, and who I’ve been becoming. So, I readily accepted the exhibition curator’s invitation to build the installation. I was shown into a room with piles of firewood and a set of instructions. Carola had written a personalized letter to me, the ‘chosen mother’ – a stranger, as far as she was concerned – explaining how the wood should be built up into two piles. She also left guidance for the hosting institution, instructing them to leave me in the gallery space alone, or with my kids if I chose to bring them along. Her instructions were a gift, offering a realization that not only does a woman desire a room of her own, but work-in-progress mothers like myself need a space flexible enough to host their children, too.

The life of the artwork began before the opening of 'Earthworks' in typed correspondences between myself and Carola. Visitors can actually see our framed exchanges hanging on the wall behind the installation. We discussed our lives and our children. In previous iterations of Mother and Sun the artist and the ‘chosen mother’ also wrote letters to each other: ‘This work is about us,’ Carola wrote in one. ‘Myself and my child / And you, and your child / You know, in a way, the firewood sculptures are an attempt to enter into dialogue with life itself’. Her invitation to collaborate, trusting another person to give body to her ideas, reveals how her values and artwork are grounded in a form of relational aesthetics.

I experienced Mother and Sun as an invitation to re-imagine rooms of our own as something less individualistic and more in line with the needs of all life around us. In that room that was temporarily mine, I was reminded of historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s claim that action is intrinsically ‘inter-action’. Whatever we do, we will always be part of a web that is connected to other people and all living beings. But how do we fit the individual and the communal into a single space?

I found one possible answer while listening to Carola’s artist talk at the opening of ‘Earthworks’. She described how, growing up in Sweden among people who were not very expressive with their feelings, she learned that they would share parts of their interior worlds through the work they did together. Her invitation to me to be in that room alone, carrying pieces of wood from one corner to another, to make that sculpture come alive again, was inspired by Sámi culture or – as she put it – her process of ‘looking for true Sámi methodologies of being in the world’.

While working on the installation I felt the ‘other’ in me returning. For a long time I learned to keep her quiet, domesticated, but I could hear her voice in my gut. She was born before I ever became ‘the mother’ and still likes to play. The voice reminded me that I was not made for one function. I can be incomplete, messy, an open vessel, full of questions.

I hope the project will continue to provoke and touch people for many years. I am curious to see how Carola will continue the conversation and which ‘chosen mothers’ will be involved in the process. Will she make space to reach those who end up mothering their parents, their friends, or even the children of others?

_{Main image: Carola Grahn, 'Earthworks', 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Bergen Kunsthall; photograph: Thor Brødreskift}