Christine Ödlund

Mountain Pine on Mainland Islet (2025)

During the residency The Listener in the spring of 2025, I spent some time living in a small cabin deep in the forest at the top of Hallandsås. There, I wandered through the woods and across the bogs, drawing what I saw. 

A bog is a wetland formed by stagnant, nutrient-poor rain and meltwater. It consists of peat layers formed over a long period of time. For some time I have been familiarizing myself with two bogs of different characters. One is Store Mossen in Hillerstorp, which is a vast, open and desolate place, where the bog pine grows crooked and twisted. Åstarpe mosse is the other. It spreads out high up on Hallandsåsen and hides in a varied marsh landscape of swamp forest and mainland islets. 

The boundary between firm ground and wetland is difficult to discern. It’s only when you take a few steps in between the trees that you realize the ground is giving way.  I listen to the breathing of the bog, to the progress of the peat as if it were an ultra-minimalist piece of music. 

But the moss also breathes something else. It is a space. A memory. A link between worlds. Life and death, presence and absence. A place to disappear into – literally and symbolically. 

In Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Tollund Man”, Tollund Man is described as a bridegroom ritually sacrificed to the bog, a sacred being, a goddess transforms him in dark fluids and preserves and embalms him like a saint. 

The periodic deformations of the tidal earth are a slow interchange between the atmosphere and the earth. Elasticity in slow, low-key sounds. The earth and wetlands become breathing beings. Everything that moves just below the threshold of our perception is registered in the barely audible. A rhythmic stillness, a non-human intelligent ability to remember. 

A selection of water colour paintings created during the residency is presented in the exhibition. 

 – Christine Ödlund 

Christine Ödlund is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm, who’s work spans art, metaphysics and science, with a particular focus on plant communication. With a background in electroacoustic music, Ödlund has a unique interdisciplinary approach to her practice. 

https://www.christineodlund.se/ 

Residency The Listener (2025, Hylte Municipality) asked what it means to listen to nature’s own voices. What sounds, choruses, tones, wills and stories emerge then? What stories do the forests and seas themselves draw up, and what do they say about us? In Laholm and around the world.