LINDA BÄCKSTRÖM

MY FIRST LAB

Linda Bäckström's work is made of contrasts. The contrast in a
childish universe represented in a trashy-caricatured way, between the
lightness of her sculptures and the density of the material, and
between the dark eerie atmosphere of "My First Lab" and its naive
title.

You will enter a labyrinth made of contradictory objects, colors and
notions. You will hesitate between the violence of knives and shotguns
and their toy-like appearance. You may remain perplexed in front of
architectural sculptures with some animal peeping out of it.

Linda Bäckström has been dealing with the representation of childhood
and children's imagination for a few years now. Her first project upon
entering the Royal Academy was about teen gangs and the vocabulary of
grouping and ganging. A certain violence associated with children is
recurrent in her creative process. She has been constantly playing
with the opposition between a sweet colorful childhood and something
unappealing in it (see her "Dirty Candy" project), between playful
innocence and issues of violence and drugs.

Bäckström began her sculpture practice by way of sewing. She would sew
shapes in fabric that would be filled up with sprayed foam. The fabric
in this case acts as a mould – let's call it a 'lost-fabric' casting
process. The artist injects these soft fabric shapes with a
foam-spray, causing the shapes to swell and become hard and compact at
the same time. At the end, the form expands and finally fills up both
the fabric and the space. One would smile imagining this tall pale
young lady once struggling with a precise sewing job and then with
crazily expanding foam.

Successive layers of meaning arise when you spend some time with Linda
Bäckström's objects and detail every step of the creation. Her
questioning of childhood's negative aspects through the refusal of
something considered sweet and joyful has been a recurrent obsession
that will certainly keep punctuating her work.

She subtly injects disturbing notions in a marshmallow-like universe.
It is interesting to note that this thinking began as she was herself
on the edge out of adolescence. It has been nurtured since then by
maturity and adulthood, with one foot still in childhood.

I would say that Linda Bäckström's universe comes from the womb. The
feminine traditional sewing job combined with the shapes the artist
gives birth to out of a growing material work together as a strong
metaphor of womanhood.

Judith Souriau
(with special thanks to Isabel Löfgren)