The Log Lady

Depicting nature isn’t necessarily the same thing as landscape painting. Ann Böttcher is the Log Lady of the Swedish art scene. Her detailed drawings of pines and spruces are very far from the traditional artistic takes on nature and the wilderness. She is a story teller, and most of her stories are about human life, though her pictures are almost always devoid of any apparent human activity.

In The Sweden Series, featured at Moderna in 2005, she leaps from anecdotes about children lost in the woods, to analyzing the roll of nature romanticism among right wing extremists, from the so called “Mulleskolan” (a sort of outdoor school for kids about nature) to deforestation caused by corporate greed. It’s ambitious to say the least!

It’s all very good, but her broad perspective is also her main problem. You can see Böttcher’s art as purely decorative and still enjoy it because of it’s aesthetic qualities, but to understand what she is trying to do you need a lot of background information not explicitly contained in the art work. Of course, this is true for a lot of conceptual art, but Böttcher’s case is rather extreme.

Just as with the Log Lady of Twin Peaks you sometimes wonder if the log in the end is just a log.