Cecilia Fogelberg: The girl who cried wolf

Cecilia Fogelberg’s soft sculptures feature the stuffed cloth bodies, bold patterning and animal motifs of children’s plush toys. They have a humorous element consisting as they do of big squishy figures, each one asymmetrical and with a centre of gravity low to the ground. One of the two pieces seems especially ludicrous with its lumpen, pincer-shaped body complete with insect and mammalian features, even a strange red-tipped beak tucked awkwardly to one side of its body and a long drooping tail or appendage. The title of the two objects The tripleheaded wolf with company, has the quality of a cartoon caption.

The humour cannot be reduced to whimsy for it has some unsettling and abject elements. The figure already discussed is like no known creature. It is perhaps some magic or mythical beast but bears a bulbous pink gland or tumour swelling out next to its beak and a pink intestine or umbilical cord coiled against its body on the opposite side. The other figure, with its long torso, three wolves heads and multiple tails suggests the tripleheaded wolf of the title. Of course, it is no less imaginary than its companion but it is assembled together from parts we recognise as belonging to wolves. As creatures, these two sculptures seem strangely maladapted. They are even slightly grotesque: their size seems exaggerated and they have a surfeit of body parts that may even be mixed up. If they are intended as toys, someone may have assembled them together incorrectly in the factory.

If the lumpier figure is content with being merely ridiculous, something about the wolf sculpture is gruesome. An animal suspended vertically always suggests a fresh kill. It has either been hanged in execution or is a recently slaughtered carcass suspended on a meat hook, maybe intended for the dinner table. Near the wolves heads, multiple bud-shape lumps burst out from the skin as if they are the paws of animals that have been swallowed whole and are trying to claw their way back out.

When animals - or their heads - come in threes, you know the scene is taking place inside a myth or fairy story. Children’s stories often feature characters in triplicate, as in the tales of The Three Little Pigs or The Three Billy Goats Gruff. But the dog Cerberus from Greek mythology also had three heads and according to legend his tail, like those hanging from the tripleheaded wolf also partly suggest, was made up of snakes.

Fogelberg’s work depicts mythical, legendary and fairy tale characters and serves to expose the darker and sometimes perverse narratives of lust, violence and revenge that are often concealed beneath the guise of myths or fairy stories for children. Among other folk tale characters, the motif of the wolf is a part of her personal mythology as she grew up in a small village in a forested area of Sweden. The wolf’s habitat is confined to the Arctic circle and the sub-Arctic regions of the world and this animal looms large in the folk stories of Northern Europe but is also widely disseminated throughout the West in fairy tales.
In fairy stories wolves often act the role of foil to or combatant with another character: a fox, a sheep, or a child such as Little Red Riding Hood. In these stories the wolf often figures as a pagan predator, the bogeyman held out as warning within a Christian story of Christ the Good Shepherd tending his flock. The title of Fogelberg’s artwork tells us that the wolf has company, but a wolf is not normally thought of as a companionate animal. Wolves get about on their own (the proverbial ‘lone wolf’) or in packs, but the one-on-one relationship mostly eludes this particular beast except in the special rapport that exists between predator and prey.

Fogelberg does not rewrite the old stories but reveals unseen elements or tells us things we already knew but had somehow forgotten. There is no simple message or alternative narrative for us to decode in these grotesque creatures. Plush toys offer familiarity, security and comfort to a child and in their way, these soft sculptures comfort us with the familiar but also frightening territory of childhood, the land where creatures come in threes, monsters abound, wolves eat little girls, animals are cut open and their bellies filled with stones.

Text by Christine Morrow, Gallery Blindside, January 2005

Birdmountain Valley, Linden Gallery, 28 April - 26 May 2006

Birdmountain Valley is a made-up location I first started to visit approximately four years ago. It is to be found between here and nowhere, just behind the mountains. The place grew out of my struggle to find my identity after living in exile from Sweden for several years. I did not feel Swedish and I did not feel Australian; I became a stranger in every position that I took and needed to put words to this struggle. I needed to make a place, an arena, a battlefield for these thoughts of identity battles.

The name Birdmountain refers to my surname Fogelberg; Birdmountain is the direct translation from Swedish into English. I have during my years in Australia considered changing my name to this more suitable English version, not to adapt to suit others, but rather to give my new identity a new name. This has been done before; my surname is originally from Germany, and was adjusted from the German Vogel to the Swedish Fogel (fågel = bird) in the late 1700s. Birdmountain Valley also has references to the old Swedish saying; ‘Bakom berget finns också folk - Behind the mountain other people live´,which simply refers to how people on the other side of the mountain are people as well as we are, and are as wise as we are, irrespective of whether or not we can see them, or know them.

When I had created this metaphorical place, I also realised that I was slowly, but surely building myself a surrounding/home that I could recognise from Sweden; I started to go to IKEA even though I hated IKEA before I left Sweden. I brought from Sweden to Australia strange embroidered kitsch and other ‘typical Swedish’ commodities on my travels, and I started to embrace Swedish traditions that before I had rejected. When my mother visited me for the first time, nearly six years after my arrival in Australia, she was stunned by the level of Swedish kitsch in my home - something that has never occurred in my upbringing. It was then that I understood I played a strong role in the play of cultural and heritage performance.

Once I understood my position, I could also start looking at other people in the same situation - Swedish or not - and I believe it is a phenomenon that happens to most people who choose, or are forced to leave something behind. It happens to emigrants and people in exile, but it is also a performance within one’s culture and the individual’s identity.

Consciously or unconsciously, we are all performing different layers of cultural heritage. Some more than others, for example there is a town in Kansas, US, called Lindsborg - also known as Little Sweden – where people are so strongly playing on their Swedish heritage that the Swedish Dalarhorse* still is the symbol for the city council, and where after 4-5 generations in America, some people still maintain the Swedish language. The welcome note on the Lindsborg’s web page* is still written in Swedish. However, the ‘Swedishness’ in Lindsborg is still very ‘American’, and you’ll find that the heritage is more like the relics of the old country performed in a contemporary way and have therefore become something totally different and unique, drawing from its immediate surrounding.

I don’t think that it is necessary for me to draw a parallel between what is happening in Lindsborg to contemporary Australian society, when what I really want to emphasise is not the result, but rather the individual’s action. Birdmountain Valley is not a Lindsborg. Birdmountain Valley is instead the virtual framework where the battle of the individual’s identity is fought and where the different colours of the individual’s cultural make-up are applied. It is a place where cultural icons, contemporary mythological heroes and gender issues are questioned and penetrated. It contains the deep forests of story telling and modern fairy tails - where most often the roles of the characters have been swapped - and where the pray has killed its hunter and no one is walking safely. It is like an adult Pipi Longstocking’s Viller Villerkulla* where one creates one’s own realities and rules and where the context of the language is made up as we walk through.

The Birdmountain Valley is a place where nothing is taken for granted and where you are always questioned about your origin. When I ended up in the emergency ward at St Vincent’s Hospital just a few weeks ago, the first question the nurse asked me was: -At which backpackers are you staying?- And I said:-At the one on the right hand side, just in front of the deep forest, on the left of the river, in Birdmountain Valley.-

Languages are our mirrors: they can bring into focus their own angle on reality and the universe surrounding us. The acquisition of new language opens up a new canvas onto which the world can take shape, and at the same time it enhances the portrait painted with one's mother tongue by drawing parallels and forming contrasts between the two (or more) languages.An old Czech saying states: 'learn a new language and get a new soul'.

*1 A red hand painted wooden horse from Dalarna, still used as a national symbol for Sweden

*2 http://www.lindsborgcity.org/

*3 Astrid Lindgren’s famous child book character Pipi Longstocking’s house; Viller Villerkulla.