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Ida Ekblad
Some of her works, such as Banging, Dubbed, The L, The LL, The Lapis Lazuli, Night Ocean Return Without and Without Hesitate (all 2010), could almost be called concrete poems - collected refuse objects have been literally embedded into wet panels of the material, finished with an inscription of the artist’s initials at the bottom, nodding to mark-making on actual street art. Similarly, in her sculpture Untitled (2010) discarded scraps of metal have been planted in a concrete pedestal. The heaviness of these pieces contrasts with the delicacy and refined balance of Figurine with Horns, Tennessee Hills and Organ Invention (all 2010), abstract shapes that somehow find completion in the artist’s ambiguous titles.
Ida Ekblad’s chance-based art practice is a literal reflection of her peripatetic methodology, a special kind of no-holds-barred urban folk art. The production of her sculptures, paintings, music and poetry revolves around ‘drifts’ taken around the cities in which she will be making the work. Like a scavenger on a mission to extract essential, survival sustenance out of the discarded remains of contemporary culture, Ekblad collects materials on her walks, sifting through piles of rubble from demolished buildings and industrial heaps of metal.
There is something sci-fi and post-apocalyptic about Ekblad’s embrace and presentation of what is essentially humanity’s waste. Equally, there’s an explosive sense of future-retro abstract centripetal release, seen for example in Stalk Gills And Caps Of Goodbye (2009), Dusty Dry On The Tongue Swallowed Some and To Drink A Glass Of Melted Snow (both 2010)..jpg)
‘Painting to me combines expressions of rhythm, poetry, scent, emotion..... It offers ways to articulate the spaces between words, and I cannot be concerned with its death, when working at it makes me feel so alive.’ Her resulting works are exquisitely vibrant, free-associative compositions pairing dissonance with visual inventiveness. She displays a prodigious and playful imagination, referencing the visual language of fellow ‘drifters’, the Situationists or the expressionism of CoBrA painters such as Asger Jorn.
