Liva Isakson Lundin

Overview

Hold Sway
Text by Magdalena Dziurlikowska
Artist and critic

A metal force swings across the room, hither, thither, round itself and out again. It dances through the air like a butterfly knife, a silver snake, a thundercloud on a lead. Strip steel hovers in the room thanks to the rope that supports its flamboyant gestures and fastens those on the wall. The ropes make it possible for the steel to fly but, in the same movement it fastens and fetters it. When Liva installs the work, the metal will begin to shred the rope and it appears that the steel could slash through them at any moment. The work is entitled To Hold Sway expressing the fact of having power or great influence. Literally, holding sway involves keeping something hovering. Isn’t this contradictory? Yet at the same time totally appropriate because this may be the way that life is. We have to try to grasp something that is free and wild. We need to understand it and control it, because it is all that we have, the only thing that is real. Perhaps we succeed in this for brief moments. The wind when one is sailing. Emotions that we can build on.