Adventures

I was thrilled when the then art curator, John Stokes, contacted me about the planned exhibition "Adventures" at Rheged Centre. It was exciting to be invited as one of the participants in a fantastic group exhibition and to do it together with my friend, the artist Mark Gibbs.

After the initial excitement subsided, I started thinking about the exhibition's theme. How should I relate to it, and how could my work be applied to the idea of adventure? I had been working on two different contrasting projects that still had something in common. My pictures from an expedition on the icebreaker Oden in the Bay of Bothnia represented the grand adventure, and the small private adventure consisted of a collection of pictures from the forests in my home region in northern Sweden.

Oden is Sweden's largest icebreaker. She was launched in 1988 and was designed to assist maritime traffic in the Bay of Bothnia during winter, but also to handle Arctic ice conditions as a research vessel. In 1991, Oden became the first non-nuclear-powered surface vessel to reach the North Pole. During the winter months, many icebreakers work to keep the sea lanes open for traffic in the Bay of Bothnia, both from Sweden and Finland, but none are as powerful as the icebreaker Oden.

For a week, I had the privilege of being on board with full access to the activities on board. This was not one of Oden's scientific expeditions. Instead, it was about what Oden was originally designed for: to provide rapid assistance to ships stuck in the ice, gather and lead convoys of freighters when conditions required it, and keep the sea lanes as open as possible for traffic. The contrast between the powerful icebreaker in action and the silent white ice landscape is striking. After a while, it's easy to imagine that you are completely alone, even though you are on board a ship with a full crew. In the bright daylight out on the ice, many seal colonies with newborn pups on the ice are passed. In the afternoon, when darkness falls, the chances of seeing the Northern Lights dance increase.