A poetic tale of orignal sin, the Iron Cage and a journey to Mother Bumble Bee and the meadow flower’s secrets.
Idea and photography Agneta Ekman. Poetry Jonas Gren and Agneta Ekman.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Looking back on my life, when can I honestly say that I have experienced God?
When I was a child there was only God the Father.
In my child’s prayers I begged Him to forgive me my sins, but all I ever felt was an emptiness and sadness in my guts. When I was out in nature with the earth and the plants, when I was painting and creating things, I never had those kind of bad feelings.
When I was a child, they demanded that I pray for forgiveness of my own sins. Did it help? No! But I understood early that my me was just a part of the vast we and the avarice and greed of men destroying so much around us. That seemed to me to be our greatest “sin”.
In my childhood it was the men who mattered. My me as a girl was trapped in that culture, that indoctrination and I have spent my life working through and exploring beyond all that. Part of it has been escaping from God Father.
In this latest work I have given form to some of these life-long creative explorations.
If I am honest, it is only in my creative work, while making art, I experience God
And yet, when I am involved in the interplay of earth and plants I do feel close to God.
In my work it is as if I am trying to sniff out faint scents, glimpse vague tracks that are already there in the natural world around me. Like this –
An abandoned mine. A landscape so disfigured by human greed it is hard to imagine anything worse. A grey desert of mine tailings, suddenly a stand of Bog Star plants. The Bog Star belongs on soil in wet meadows. What’s it doing here? I don’t have my camera with me, but I know I had to come back next year when the Bog Star is flowering. Those Bog Stars were telling me they belonged in my next book.
Reading more about it – my fellow Swede Carl von Linné named Bog Star Parnassia palustris, meaning: ”grows on a cult site where it is sunny and the ground is damp”. He describes it in his book Blomstrens Biläger. The remarkable Bog Star flower is double gendered. Each flower has a pistil which grows out like a male organ, bends down, reaching the stamen and fertilizes itself. In Bog Star’s double-gender flower chalice, God revealed.
All our proud modern knowledge, our reason, physics and chemistry are all too simple. Think about our planet Earth as if a machine is silly. So much sickness of power hides within our present beliefs. Barbaric persecution of women and their sexuality has been done and still is being done in the name of our religions.
When I think of God as if a Mother I can go beyond my heritage and find freedom in deeper and richer feelings. The grace and consolation my childhood religion pretended to offer, I now find in the conviction that I belong to the Earth. My me has become a creature born with earth on the soles of her feet and close to God Mother through all the animals and insects and growing things. That which I call ”I” can give me back to Mother Earth. My “I” may grow greener and more beautiful.
That’s where this new work begins, in the lap of Mother Bumblebee..
Agneta Ekman
Poetry from the exhibition:
Den amfibiska skriften: Du förstår inte
Vad är det?
Kväkandet
i botten
av världen
———————————
Jag hittade dig, slåtterblomma
på en förödd plats
När jag gick vidare
för att lära känna dig
visade det sig
att du innehöll
både han och hon
som böjde sig mot varandra
och befruktade sig
———————————
kan både gå och låta helig
I kyrkan Talar han med heliga rösten
av Agneta Ekman och Jonas Gren
Agneta Ekman 