A six-meter-long giant hogweed made of reeds, wheat flour glue, cardboard, foam hoses, textiles, spray paint, and nylon cord stretches in all directions with its mammoth leaves and glowing hairy stem.
The plant (Heracleum mantegazzianum) is an intrusive and unstoppable weed, with a phototoxic sap that causes serious burns. It spread rapidly in Europe and North America since it was introduced as an ornamental garden plant in the 19th century, and today it is classified as an invasive species, threatening both economical and ecological values.
Ingela Ihrman (b. 1985, Kalmar/Stockholm) transcends the botanical truth of this species by horizontally suspending its elongated replica and painting the hollow interiors of its shaft in pink, drawing intimacies between the plant and the human body. By crafting its oddly sensual aesthetics out of easily available household materials, she further distances this biologic being from socially constructed classifications, those of “noxious” and “invasive” genera that threaten to overtake the local species, in order to implant it within a horizon that rests on heterogeneous contacts and miscellaneous intimacies. This is a way to connect the hogweeds taking over a landscape with how passion and desire totally overwhelm both body and mind.
Ihrman incorporates tactile handicraft techniques and traditional folk art in order to point at historical processes through which plants and animals have influenced human forms of life, cultures, beliefs and thoughts – an influence continuing to this date and beyond. Replicas of existing or extinct plants and animals, sometimes in the form of uncanny wearable costumes, are placed in the context of performances that, at once imaginative and disturbing, bring the creatures into life, giving birth or blooming. Sites of performance become surfaces for emotional projection, where xenophobic notions of “invasion” versus “authenticity” and “originality” are contested as a critique of identity politics in contemporary post-democratic societies. As she poses it, the question inherent in her practice is: “Wouldn’t life be more joyful if we love what is around us in abundance, rather than long for what is distant or extinct?” AM
self-presentation:
Ten years ago, I swam in a chilly forest lake, dressed up in a goldfish costume I had made the day before from found plastic, packing tape, orange spray paint, and a snorkel. Four years ago, I bloomed pink and white as a giant water lily bud in a greenhouse pond in Kalmar, the small town where I grew up. This was my MFA graduation project, but above all, an inhibited teenager’s revenge on an adolescence of silence and solitude. Watching the Swedish filmmaker Jan Lindblad’s Anaconda wrestling for the first time—violent nature and human embrace taking place in a Guyanese river in the ’70s, I knew something decisive was happening. Exploring the Botanical Garden of Hägersten, an imaginary garden run in collaboration with Sofia Hultin and Johan Eriksson, made me realize the power of kinship, hope, and music without looking away from vulnerability or the difficulties of life.
