Ida Boman

(b. 1981, Umeå, Sweden)

stammar tiden märgen talet, 2024
Stems the Time the Marrow the Speech
Installation: Birch, steel wire, wall paint, text, epoxy, hair, stone
and river clay

Ida Boman is interested in slow and subtle processes, both human and non-human, where contrasts between large events and details can evoke a sense of absurdity. With a transdisciplinary approach, she explores questions about how our knowledge is made and the importance of incomprehensibility in such processes. She seeks the poetic potential that might be found in all kinds of relations, where she, through poetry, is looking for what she calls elastic places and extended bodies.

The installation stammar tiden märgen talet [Stems the Time the Marrow the Speech] is based on the felling of a birch in the mountains of Västerbotten and the following reflection on whether it really is a mountain birch if it is tall and straight and does not deviate from the normal appearance of a birch. The installation consists of the fallen birch together with sculpture and text. In her work, the artist has been inspired by the patchy markings of the tree where clusters of lichen spread out like islands in an archipelago. For her, the archipelago is an intersection between the solid and the liquid, where land disintegrates, and lines are fractured and redrawn.

‘The idea of the line and its material reality is recurring in my practice. Drawn physically in a landscape, like an extension of words, the direction of a thought or a tense wire. I make attempts at diversions and disruptions where body and place are inevitably in relation and where differences (not similarities) are elementary.’

Interview with Ida Boman