The choir of the sheep

A work in collaboration between the artists Marlene Lindmark and Anna Lindvall.

In her contribution to “a part of the Landscape”, Marlene Lindmark has chosen to go deep under the vegetation and humus layers of the Midland forest, to the locations in the Landscape where sediment was transported by ancient waterways and formed clay. The process of finding, cleaning and shaping local clay from the Midland is in itself a journey back to a time so far back that it is difficult to overview. Where exactly was this place a million years ago? Where does the foundation, the layers, come from? The clay as material, and perhaps also as memory, has been washed, sifted, processed and fired into tribute portraits of some of those who shape the landscape above the ground; our sheep. Sheep’s time here is also long, but more tangible than Clay’s. After all, we have been here together, and generations of other plants and animals that remember the landscape of the grazing sheep also remain, still together, albeit with new challenges.

The work “The Choir of the Sheep” takes its final form in the conversation with Anna Lindvall, who was invited as Marlene’s poetic expert in the project. With Anna’s proposal for a choral work, where a recording of the sheep’s voices is transformed into song and accompanied live in the forest by Anna on the electric organ, the artists tie together the incomprehensible volumes of time in a condensed moment. The sheep’s choir is heard and seen by us who have gathered there in the twilight for a while. A moment that becomes a memory. An experience that adds to all the geological, organic, physical and spiritual memories that built, and are still building, our landscape.

Marlene Lindmark is an artist educated at the Department of Ceramic Art at Kunsthöyskolen in Oslo. She works in drawing, sculpture and mixed media, and is represented in collections and with public works in Kalmar, Mörbylånga, Borgholm, Östersund, Växjö, Antwerp and Oslo. Marlene has also been part of Kultivator since the beginning, and also ran Galleri ML in Borgholm as well as the art exhibition operations at Öland’s museum, Himmelsberga.

Anna Lindvall is educated at the Nordic Art School in Kokkola, Finland, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In recent years, Anna has worked with intuitive animation based on pencil drawings, and has participated in several jury-judged collective exhibitions in the county with both drawings and film. Her practice also includes sound art and music production, both in independent productions in the borderland between art music and pop, and as parts of installations or video works.

The project is implemented with the support of the Swedish cultural council
More info here