The Return of Light

One sun, a hundred moments. Sometimes visible as a clear disc, sometimes dissolved in light or hidden behind clouds. The same star, but every encounter with it is different.

My watercolors revolve around the lasting and the transient — permanence and impermanence. The starting point is our relationship with the sun: a star at an unimaginable distance, whose presence is at the same time part of our most everyday experience. We feel its warmth, follow the changes in its light and count our days and years. The sun marks our place in the universe and provides the conditions for life here. It also holds a force that can consume.

The sun is there whatever clouds obscure it. Measured against our lives, it seems permanent. Yet our experience of it is constantly changing. The light shifts with the weather, the time of day and the place where we are. What returns never meets us in quite the same way.

In the exhibition The Return of Light at Husby konsthall, two parts of my work met: a hundred small sun paintings and ten large watercolors in which the sun is present through water. Together they explore how something so distant can become close and concrete, and how a returning light can hold moments that never come back.

100 Days of Sun consists of a hundred watercolors. Each image is a brief visit, an encounter with the sun for a limited time. The repetition holds the series together, while the differences between the images are given room. The sun appears, disappears and returns. A clear shape can be almost dissolved in the next image.

The title also holds the time the work is made of. A hundred days is a sequence of single moments, each with its own presence. Seen together, the images become a way of looking at both what lasts and what changes. The same sun is in all of them, but the days are different.

In the large watercolors I meet the sun through water. The light is reflected in the surface, refracted on its way through the water and changed by the movement of the waves. A single sun can be split into thousands of fleeting suns. The glitter is familiar, but it can also bring a starry sky to mind. The concrete and the cosmic are close to each other.

The three paintings Several Suns Ago I, II and III revolve around these reflections. The title lets the sun become a measure of time gone by. The surface of the water carries the light for a moment, before the movement changes it. The next reflection appears almost in the same place, but is already a different one.

In The Long Now a swimmer is surrounded by water, rings and glitter. Here the limited time of a human being meets the feeling of something that reaches far beyond her. A swim is a simple, bodily experience. At the same time such a moment can feel strangely vast, as if the present has been given more room.

Time, Suspended I, II and III take the eye below the surface. The bodies are in a state where movement, weight and light are experienced differently. The title approaches the feeling of stepping out of the ordinary flow of time for a while. Time goes on, but the experience of it changes. The pause is temporary; we will return to the surface.

In The Hours Between I, II and III there are the birds, the boats and the open water. The motifs belong to a recognizable world, with moments that perhaps do not stand out through any particular event. Yet it is exactly such hours that can stay with us: the light over the water, a place, the feeling of being there.

The large formats give me room to linger over the fleeting. The motifs can feel slow, even though a reflection or the movement of a body changes in an instant. Here lies a connection between the small sun paintings and the large water paintings. Both are about time, but give it different room.

Water is also in the painting itself. It carries the pigment across the paper, lets shapes emerge and edges dissolve. I work with it and try to leave room for what I cannot fully control. The changeability of the material is part of the work on the images.

When I think about what we have and what we lose, it is about the moments and what they hold. A meeting, a feeling, someone’s presence. Something that matters while it lasts, but that we can only partly carry with us as memory.

The light can return without the moment coming back. I want to linger in the joy of being here, knowing that the moment changes even as we experience it.

The Return of Light (Ljusets återkomst) was shown at Husby konsthall from 3 to 25 October 2026, together with Jenny Övrebö.