In her new collection, Danelle Bergstrom personifies the land as a vessel for emotion. The paintings pictorialise recent experiences in Hill End, Australia, and Källskär, Åland, Finland, functioning as tangible footprints along well-trodden roads winding through the artist’s memory. Enlisting water as a trope for the tectonics of memory and emotion, they chart a journey from contentment to turmoil; from still dams to tumultuous seas. Here Bergstrom meditates on the Swedish term våga, which translates to ‘dare’ whilst våg also denotes ‘wave’. She builds on the idea of physical and metaphysical reflection, looking at how disturbances of a water body create distortions of reality and yet the surface quickly regains composure – a poetic symbol for the experiences of loss and rebirth so endemic to Bergstrom’s art.

In Bergstrom’s Hill End landscapes, ghostly lilacs entwined with earthy umbers and swathes of blue water create a spectral vision of the landscape that lingers between the real and the remembered. For the artist, this regional setting is a place of celebration, sorrow and serenity, embodying memorable years living there with her family. Rendering tranquil dams and native bushland, she pictures water as a cathartic tool – its surface interplays of distortion and re-composure symbolising the propensity for the past to help us heal and progress. With no defined perspectival focus to anchor our gaze, the painterly dams invoke a broader emotional and psychological exploration of self and environment. While her Hill End works are hushed, warm and serene, Bergstrom’s Scandinavian seascapes evoke the roaring, dark energy of the ocean. Drawing from a recent residency on the remote island of Källskär, the artist pictures the unrelenting waves as the heartbeat of the sea; a rhythm that counterparts our own pulsing body. Inky indigos and icy whites mingle in choppy strokes, symptomising the fraught process of surrendering to the heart; not in an indulgent or sentimental way, but as a raw and honest acceptance of self. The works are profoundly sensorial – loud, unrelenting waves ricochet around the picture plane with primal vigour while the wintry sun prickles exposed skin and a salty perfume drifts in the ocean breeze.  Their dominant scale lures us head-first into primitive worlds where nature reigns superior and our repressed psychological wilderness materializes with subconscious persistence.

Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue essay by Elli Walsh, Arts Writer