Visual Artist, Educator

History as a Breeze, as Breath was developed during AIRS – Process Artistic Residency that happened at Skövde Art Museum, through four visits to Skövde between October 2025 and August 2026.

The project began with a historical fact I discovered during my early research: the presence of prisoners of war in Sweden during the Great Northern War, and stories of hospitality offered to them in and around Skövde. Their experience of being received as strangers resonated with my own experience of being a guest, as an artist in residence.
From this resonance, a character slowly began to emerge. I called him Ishmael. I became interested not only in what might have happened to these people, but in what it means to arrive as a stranger and “the enemy” in an unfamiliar place and to be received there as a host.

Inevitably, this story began to cross with my own. Between 2007 and 2009, I lived in Sweden while studying Fine Art. I too had arrived from elsewhere and had experienced hospitality, friendship and the gradual formation of a sense of belonging. Returning to Sweden almost twenty years later, these experiences began to intermingle with the historical story I was researching. The distance between their journey and mine sometimes seemed strangely porous.

During the residency, I tried to bring Ishmael into being through encounters with others. I entered into postal correspondence with artists in Skövde, exchanging letters, images and fragments around this still uncertain character. I imagined him a drummer. I also worked with students from Axvall Folkhögskola and Hellidens Folkhögskola, developing
workshops in which we approached hospitality, displacement and the sense of belonging, through artistic practice. Rather than trying to illustrate history, these encounters became ways of asking what it might mean to receive another person, particularly when the world around them is marked by conflict.

My artistic process often moves between different kinds of knowing. Historical and pictorial research, archival research, conversations with scholars and Historians, coexist with drawing, photography, moving image, writing, performance and intuitive processes. I am interested in the point at which research reaches the limits of what can be known and
imagination begins. This does not mean inventing the past as if it were fiction. It means trying, temporarily, to inhabit its spaces and to embody its characters: walking through landscapes, looking at images, following journeys, listening to stories and allowing fragments and breaths of another time to enter the present. The past becomes something approached through the body as much as through documents.

During this process another historical presence appeared: Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish polymath and mystic, who spent considerable time in Skara and traveled repeatedly between Sweden and London. Following his movements created another unexpected crossing between historical research and my own life. While making this work,
I realised that I was living and working only a few minutes away from an area of London called Swedenborg Gardens, in an area of London that used to be the base of the local Swedish community. Swedenborg had moved between some of the same geographical worlds that I now moved between, separated by almost three centuries.
During this project other questions appeared and remained deliberately unresolved. I wondered, for instance, whether an act of hospitality towards strangers more than three hundred years ago could have any distant resonance with the later Swedish idea of Folkhemmet: the people's home.

 

Not as a historical continuity, but as an image: the possibility of the world imagined as a home. Over time I came to understand that hospitality itself is a form of return. I was returning to Sweden, this time also through other people's journeys, following traces left by those long gone who had themselves experienced moving away from home.
Perhaps this is what art allows us to do with the dead. Not to reconstruct them completely, but to make a space in which they might become present again to allow their unfinished stories to encounter our own.

In that sense, making History as a Breeze, as Breath became for me something close to an act of healing and pilgrimage. For centuries, people travelled through the landscapes around Skövde as pilgrims, carrying questions, grief, hope and stories with them. My repeated journeys began to feel like another kind of pilgrimage: between London and
Sweden, archive and imagination, the living and the dead I was again, just like my characters, trying to find that space where home is.
I noticed that History was no longer about facts that happened in the past and left traces, but about that something that is always present within those traces and briefly becomes perceptible again
as a breeze,

as breath.

​

London, 13 of September, 2026