The Remote Commons

Löfdahl’s materials are often unpretentious and close to hand – not infrequently modified everyday objects like plaster, wire rods, magnets, or string. The act of making the work is simultaneously a way to get to grips with its subject and constitutes an attempt to make the abstract and diffuse concrete and graspable by taking the abstraction further.

Her sculptures in fact constitute the materialisation of actual phenomena. While subjects like molecular engineering and probability currents are impossibly complex and abstract for the layman, Löfdahl is interested in their real-world implications and applications. In the early 90’s Löfdahl made a series of works titled Model (“Model M”, “Model B”) which are indeed exactly that – models of proposals and conjecture. Löfdahl’s work can be understood using this literal approach.

In the exhibition the sculpture Cygnus (2021) takes its name from the Greek for swan and is the name of a constellation of stars visible from the northern hemisphere. White swan, black swan, purple swan. A bowing, damaged, lifting spirit. With its wide array of references, the swan is a Pandora’s Box of associations: unexpected events of great consequence, large numbers, immense mass, vast distances, and so on.

The sculpture Dreaming of MOFs (2019) is an interpretation of a molecular structure assembled from rice grains, magnets and sticks in an interface of surface, dynamic and application. MOF stands for the real-world chemical compound Metal Organic Frameworks; an extraordinary porous structure in which a single gram can cover over 7000m2 in surface area, perhaps with the biological analogy in fungal mycorrhizal networks.

The Actual Outcome (2019) takes the form of a model hilly landscape held aloft by an architectural substructure. The work is in fact an uncharacteristically direct reference to a developmental model by the geneticist C Waddington in 1957. Developing out of Löfdahl’s interest in ideas regarding patterns in human thinking and patterns of movement, both resulting in the emergence of paths, Waddington’s introduction of “deep furrows” added a third dimension. In the converging “deep” tracts deviation is very unlikely to happen, whereas in other positions branching is frequent.