STATEMENTS

”On his philosophy of art, the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth argued that ’Any traces of the artist’s hand should be eliminated from production so that ideas may be expressed directly.’ In Swedish artist Evelina Hägglund’s practice, the idea of such an artificial divide between body and mind is senseless; ’I believe that by including my very hands, by incorporating me as a maker in the work, I am in a much more honest position to express an idea. Ideas are not separate from the body.’

Hägglund’s practice explores the interplay between body, matter, and language. She is interested in material expressions that goes beyond what can be articulated in language – attempting to create an output which exists outside of linguistic category. Using materials such as metal, clay, cement, graphite and canvas, Hägglund meticulously and expressively produces works that are at the same time highly personal and interwoven with its surroundings and the outside world. Correspondingly, it is simultanously a philosophical and internal endeavour as much as it is political and expressing something crucial about the globalised world in which we live.” Live Drønen, 2025

“Hägglund’s practice has evolved into a post-language approach to meaning, where significance arises not through representation but through feeling, presence, and transformation. Her sculptural work originates from marginal, discarded gestures—scribbles on paper—that transition into three-dimensional forms. In her work, the body functions as a composting tool: gathering piles of debris, ideas, and experiences, breaking them down, and reassembling them into new sculptural forms. These ’modernist tumbleweeds’, to quote Sara Walker, challenge our relationship to space and ephemerality.” Clara Donadoni, 2025

“19.03.2024.

The Thunder Bottle

I have found a thunder bottle; a barometer. It indicates air pressure and forecasts the weather. When the water in the body of the bottle rises into the spout, the pressure is low, indicating bad weather. Conversely, when it drops, it shows high pressure. The thunder bottle, which renders visible something as elusive as air pressure, reminds me of an aspect of my practice that is constantly present but challenging to articulate: pressure. The inner: all my feelings. The pressure, the outer: the weather, time, politics, nature, culture. How I in the studio work with transfer of pressure. How I seethe from within and pour lines on canvas. How I rush into the materials.

My interior pressure in relation to my external environment results in metal sculptures, works in clay, cement, acrylic, charcoal, graphite, rust and dust. Continuously, I manifest what I would have liked to write and say if I could, instead in physical, material form. I have no choice but to prioritize physicality over words; over representation. I have always made art because there is so much I cannot say. Sometimes the process is more violent than I wish. I am looking to control myself.

I work with my breathing, with my movements, but I so often loose control. I overflow from within; pressure seeps out of my body, my arms and hands. I do not hide the raw and brutal outcomes. I want to be honest. I want to show my real experience of being alive. I have to deal with the pressure inside and outside of me. This is why I work. This is why I keep on working.” Evelina Hägglund, 2024



”Evelina Hägglund‘s sculptures, drawings, and notations made in an indecipherable language, attest not only to the difficulty of communicating interior experiences, but evoke the forms of nature, trees, branches, nervous systems. Hägglund says ‘My position is between culture and nature. My task is to undo the constructed binary between the two.’ She has made works involving actual excavations into the ground. She relates holes in the landscape to be like holes in language. Each of her works are an abstract utteration and her titles point to the limits of language.” Louisa Hunt and Ben Tufnell, 2023

“My practice is a way of existing in the margins of culture. My position is between culture and nature. My task is to undo the constructed binary between the two. To work against classification. Through working with sculpture, drawing and sometimes painting, I am looking for another way of living in the material world. For anotherness, for a possible future of meaning. I want to to realize a wild state, I want to embody the unbridled phenomena people/or I, cannot rationally control, solve or build away. I want to give way for untamed, forever wild, inner and outer ‘nature’. I believe in wilderness.” Evelina Hägglund, 2023



”I prioritize physical experience over language. I want to make work, that is ‘just what it is’. In which there is nothing—yet, to be named and signified. And that in this sense, is outside of linguistic category. I work with the relation between my body, language, nature and matter. I make telluric materia fail meeting human language properties such as symbols, mimesis and representation. I claim the rights to operate by other parameters then what is writable. It is not a return to pre-critical thinking, rather it is a shift in focus to the physical world. While working with and against creative and destructive forces in nature and culture, my work becomes my diary. When there are no sufficient words to share my experience in, my reaction is to take all the materials available, like graphite, and make something else. Anotherness. Ceasing trying to get signification ’right’, sets me free. I can bend and twist and invert and fill and learn and unlearn the world as I imagine it.” Evelina Hägglund, 2021

Yves Scherer in conversation with Evelina Hägglund
Interview with Yves Scherer, 2024

Extract from my diary, August, 2023
Text by Evelina Hägglund, 2023

at one with the world
Text by Angelica Jopling, 2022

SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED,GLADLY BEYOND —A CONVERSATION WITH EVELINA HÄGGLUND AND MINH LAN TRAN
Interview with Rhiannon Harper, 2022

Evelina Hägglund
Text by Celina Albæk, 2021