Mam Sväm Mom

My Grandmother was born 1916 in Östersund, in the north part of Sweden. She came from a world that is far from mine.
In the 90's she shaped the memories of my childhood by documenting it with her compact camera. Even when her eyesight got worse she shot from the hip
and captured frozen flash moments of Christmas dinners and everything in between. She collected them in albums that she neatly stacked and kept in a cupboard.
It became a tradition for me and my brother, to sit in front of the cupboard and look through the images and laugh at our younger selfs, everytime we visited her.
For me the albums became almost like an additional member of the family that told you about what had been.
When she passed away in 2015 I inherited all the negatives from her 196 albums. I then almost automatically started using them in my art practice.
At the time my negative scanner was very bad and when I scanned the negatives the images came out blurry and much more like a memory then a photograph.
I started painting with the blurry images as a guide and suddenly the images took on a new life that captured stories that where beyond my childhood memories.

My grandmother always signed her letters and gifts to my family with "Mam Sväm Mom". "Mam" stood for the Swedish word "Mamma" that means Mother, "Sväm" for "Svärmor"
meaning Mother in law, and "Mom" for "Mormor" meaning Grandmother. After her passing I have become a Mother myself and sorted myself in the line of all the "Mums".
Since 2015 and still going I have worked with this project based in these albums and I call it Mam Sväm Mom.

Studies of the Universe