These crafty pieces emerged from my hanging around people who don’t normally associate with art—that is, family and old friends in Gothenburg, Sweden. My aunt and niece visiting from Poland collaborated on the flag garland. My niece helped painting the flags, bleeding the Swedish blue and yellow into green. My aunt glued them to string and I hung the garland all around the kitchen to be seen from the window, so to consciously provoke nosy neighbors with this silly multicultural celebration. But in effect, mostly because of the irritation of my father who couldn’t access anything in the cupboards, we ended tearing the whole thing down after a week.

The second garland was made for the country home of Maria Ståhl, whom I’ve known since I was eight. Her house overlooks the sea at the island Lilla Askerön. We gathered pinecones in the surrounding forest and I tied them onto string. Maria’s brother and husband helped to climb the ladder and hang the garland high up in the pine trees, facing the sunset that we watched from their porch. She left it out over the winter and as far as I know, it is still there.

I found a bag of cocktail parasols in the basement (left over from some ’80s party I had in high school) and brought them to one of our pathetic sunbathing attempts. The Swedish summer weather was cold, the sand kind of gray, the beach completely desolate—not exactly your Copa Cobana. But with the help of my little niece again, we unfolded all the umbrellas and stuck them in the sand, managing at least to create quite a tourist attraction for ourselves.

texts on Garlands: