Malin
Griffiths

In her book Bübins Kid, Mare Kandre writes about a young woman growing. 

In hunger the girl wanders around in her overgrown garden, sometimes mirroring herself in the black water of the well. 

She can hear the hair dry around her face. A winding brushy growing twisting of all grip. The woman who lurches out of the child’s stubborn shell. A blooming inside, unlike the one which occurs on the outside.

In my work I am interested in contradictions; places, both inner and outer bearing dual roles. 

A photograph can act as a link between the otherwise impossible, the past and the present.

When my daughter turned thirteen years old I remembered a letter I wrote, at the same age, to myself as a grown up. The memory became humble evidence of the time that had passed. The distance between us is infinite and non-existent at the same time. This work is a farewell and a preparation, a search for an identity and a reflection on contexts that have changed. A feeling of being in a house of mirrors in which everything needs to be renamed because the old ones have lost their meaning. 

Impressions become pictorial spaces where things are put in order. Fil.Dr. Anna Banér speaks about the digital revolution. Around us is a dense fog of information that seeps even to the children’s room. In Bübins Kid branches grow uncontrollable through the window in a similar way as todays throng of mediamade, possible, improved versions of ourselves penetrate into our consciousness.The world is more contradictory than the one I grew up in. A childhood so different to mine. Children are exposed to the same demands as adults, while old ideas persist. A mess of contradictions. Banér believes that to manage to live in a world of constant change, requires trust. Trust develops within solid close relationships. It must come from both ways, just like the word trust (in swedish) can be read.

I am interested in how adults have a tendency to romanticize childhood. How youth are often represented as beauty, innocence and perfection, as the ephemeral perfection in a flower before life evaporates. So unlike the young persons own experience. That gap is endless.