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ARTIST FEATURE • Anna-Kajsa Wikström

In our latest artist feature we want to show what our latest member to our group of artists is up to during this pandemic. Anna-Kajsa

Wikström (b. 1981) is newly graduated from Konstfack Ädellab/metal design with her very intruiging exam work 'Springwater'. It is an installation of casted ice, latex and photography based on the shape of the old traditional tool for carrying water, the yoke.

- In the future humans will face clean water becoming more rare, meanwhile many today are experiencing a lack of meaning and spirituality in their lives - two facts I believe are correlated. My undergraduate work concerns human´s relationship to water. It deals with my own anxiety concerning the troubling effects of pollution and how the modern human´s lifestyle of consumption seems to have reduced water into just a product. My work is also about the people who choose differently, the spring as a mythological being, and how carrying water may be an act of protest in our high tech-society of today. It ranges from observations of what might be a contemporary spring-cult to a figurative body of arts and craft.

In many parts of the world people still carry their drinking water using a yoke or large and heavy water cans. The situation is quite different in Sweden where we have had running water for nearly hundreds of years. The yoke is therefor a tool which still is being used by many people and the carrying of water is also still an issue affecting the everyday life of girls and women whom is forced spending time supporting their family with water than getting an education or finding paid work. Meanwhile the act of carrying water in some countries is part of everyday life, excerting the body, it may in our society be an expression for protesting stress and overconsumtion of the modern society. A society that might not consider our longing for a deeper purpose.    

/Excerpt from Anna-Kajsa Wikströms Essay - read the full version (in Swedish) on her artist page!

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