NSU Circle Seven’s first residency, Ricklundgärden, March 2017 

Photo by Grace Gelder

The first residency to be organised by Circle Seven immediately followed the winter symposium in Saxnäs, northern Sweden. I think this played a significant role in the residency’s success – we had time to continue some of the creative processes sparked by the symposium. Us four residents waved goodbye to our fellow artist researchers as the bus pulled out for the long drive back to Umeä. We looked at each other and decided to head for the frozen lake where we walked for a couple of hours, guided only by occasional poles marking the route and snowmobile tracks. Apart from a dog pulling a man on skis, we had the vast lake to ourselves. Once it had become clear, later in the evening, that between the four of us we could devise, cook, eat and clear up a meal from the left over bits and pieces in the larder, there was little doubt in my mind that we’d thrive together in this isolated place for two weeks.

The three- day symposium had been an intense mix of presentations, performances and discussions, on the theme of the legacy of artistic research. Now we had a luxurious two weeks to absorb all this and develop our work in the fantastic landscape of Saxnäs and the Ricklundgärden Museum. We were a photographer, a performance artist, an artist and a writer. We each came with particular projects but we also devised work together. For me, this was the heart of the residency: time to write my own stuff and time to work with others.

To give you a flavour of our time in Ricklundgärden, here are a few extracts from the diary and the essay that I wrote there.

There are no stores in this museum of Ricklundgärden. Plenty of cupboards, but no stores. No withholding of things for later. I keep finding the painting of the girl asleep in the boxed-in bed, next to the door to Emma and Folke’s bedroom. This morning the painting is blue – the walls, the rug, the potty, the cover, her dress, all blue. Yesterday they were darker. But what do I want this museum to do as it seeps inside me, as I place an imaginary scene over the actual one? I’ve been the girl in the bed and a hunter in the snow, returning over the hill. This is Emma and Folke’s place. We are welcome guests, and intruders. Our fourteen days of residency are soon over. I’ll go home to my own house and see it anew, the things I’ve gathered and not gathered, the things on show and the things hidden.

It’s equinox, the time when, wherever you are on the earth, there is twelve hours between sunrise and sunset; so on that day all people have something in common. On the 20 March 2017 at five minutes to six, the sunrise is a mound of apricot embers lying on a grate that stretches as far as I can see. A beginning or an ending? At three minutes to six the fire is almost out, but high up a smear of ash escapes northwards. At three minutes past six it’s fading fast, nothing much now but a flat grey-blue and an absolute stillness. At twenty-seven minutes past six, the twigs of the nearest tree begin to quiver, uneasy performers of a silent instruction to pick up their play and begin again. Stir yourself with your dance! At thirty-seven minutes past five in the late afternoon, I set out to climb the hill above the museum to see the sun move on from equinox. But I broke my walking pole by pulling it out beyond the STOP sign. So I broke two sticks from dead branches lying low on the snow, one smooth, one hung about with lichen, and pushed on up the hill. The sunset was magnificent.

The dominant metaphor for me, and I think for others, is of covering up, because of the snow of course. And the sense we found in the museum that, despite the claim to display, there is also a covering. Like all museums, it reveals and conceals. So whilst there are no stores here of covered objects, there are stories not told. And because the landscape is so all-consuming outside – the far horizon, the mountains, the frozen lakes and forests – the eye is drawn from the assembled relatively humble objects in the museum, to the great outside, an uncovering of vision from the inside to the outside, but then only to find that that landscape too is covered. There will always be a cover-up.

Photo by William Card