They Were Always Doing Something

2026
Linen on metal rods
150 x 200 x 60 cm

We all carry with us imagery of our pasts. Some lighter, some less so; some fictional, and some very much too real. This project is a reminiscence of such an image—existing, perhaps, only in one’s imagination. A northern summer low-set sun, a sea salt breeze through linen sheets, a sheer hiding place to embed one’s mind within. One enters, inhabits—briefly—and then departs, a slightly different version of who one was just a moment prior. “They were always doing something”, Tove Jansson wrote of her characters, at once mythical and ideal reflections of us all. “Quietly, without interruption, and with great concentration, they carried on with the hundred-and-one small things that made up their world”—however quiet and mundane, in real life or in our minds.

Title from Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea