It was a summer’s day in the south of Sweden. Two small children age three and seven are picking raspberries in the sunshine beside a grey shack.  Two women, one thirty years younger than the other, are drinking coffee. They go back a long time together. They have the same history sort of, but are still so different. They are talking about past times and future visions and are contemplating what they are going to do with the children on this particular and beautiful day.  They get the idea of letting the children paint their own naked bodies and then making a print of them, as the artist Yves Klein did. Paint is mixed in a minute, and big brushes appear from inside the shack. The children’s small bodies quickly get covered with green paint with a lot of joy and excitement. While the paint is still wet the two women lift one child at a time, and make a print of the child’s body on paper that has been laid out on the grass.  The children then happily run around and have the paint washed off them by being sprayed with the garden hose.  There is laughter and screaming when the cold water reaches their slight bodies. The older woman, whose studio it is, makes pancakes for lunch, a tradition on their yearly visit to the grey summer studio, a shack in the back garden, a place for inspiration and reflection. The raspberries picked earlier are served with the pancakes and everyone enjoys the mixture of sweet pancakes, flavourful raspberries, summer sunshine and nurturing company. 

In the presence of a photograph we can suddenly sense a feeling or a smell from a moment long lost. But in this case it was the act of ‘mark making’, of printing paint on paper that made the stronger indentation on my memory. The body prints of my children which for many years were rolled up in a cupboard are Included in my installation “Beyond in time”. The abstract black and white panels have perforated sections, which allow the almost ghost-like images of the bodies to be revealed. The layering illustrates repetition, recall and habit and is a reference to how memories are instituted.  It is through our children that we re-live our own childhood, the borders in between the two get blurred; through time it all gets hazy and almost unreal. Recollection and remembrance are the key elements in establishing the past. An experience fades and gets distorted; a certain moment, when recalled at a later stage, is only a construction of the original event.