Sara Granér / Derail Us from Evil

Sara Granér’s vibrant visual language and distinctive fable-like creatures have stepped out of the drawings and assembled around an absurdist model railway. Tufted yarn rugs meet welded scrap metal and ceramics in a playful installation that evokes a society seen from above.

Räls oss ifrån ondo [Derail Us from Evil] explores collective experiences, dreams and frustrations linked to the railway. Symbolically, the railway also represents human communication. Why does it have to be so run-down, and why is booking a ticket so difficult? Where are we heading? Granér combines playfulness with political gravity and existential confusion.

Sara Granér

When I draw, I’m fascinated by how the technique interacts with the content of the images, and how an atmosphere emerges via the material I’m working with. Watercolours often represent something ambivalent and melancholic, while crayons represent a connection with the past, with childhood and something fundamental. I’ve been drawn towards exploring materials and their significance for expression beyond drawing. As part of this search, I’ve taken courses in tufting and structural welding at KKV – Konstnärernas kollektivverkstad [The Artists’ Collective Workshop] in Gothenburg and Bohuslän, and I’ve also worked with ceramics for many years.  It’s fascinating to see how drawing can move into the three-dimensional world. My sculptural work is often close to drawing, and tends to have a two-dimensionality of its own.

For the exhibition Räls oss ifrån ondo [Derail Us from Evil], I’ve worked with a variety of different materials to build a world that brings to mind play and a society viewed from above. In a way, the artistic techniques I’ve used are direct opposites of each other. Metal is hard and rigid, while tufted yarn is soft and organic. At the same time, there’s a roughness in the expressions that brings them together and which I think interacts well with the way I draw. I often draw with rough, sprawling lines, and there’s something rigid about the figures that brings to mind the angular body language of a robot or a hieroglyph. 

I don’t think it’s purely by chance that I’ve been drawn to tufting and welding. Scrap metal is exciting in a world that has to deal with incredible destruction – ecologically, socially and interpersonally. Steel and metal once represented optimism, growth and strength, but now that we’re trying to tackle the dark side of industrial capitalism and crises, something vulnerable is emerging. By contrast, tufting can respond to a need to introduce gentle care into the world. At the same time, there’s an inherent ambivalence in the material: short threads of yarn that can be separated from each other in a different way compared to the brushstrokes of a painting. There’s also something fascinating about how an image can exist in the borderland between two and three dimensions. When the soft and the hard come together, I find that it awakens something tender. There’s also an encounter between the grey of the metal and the colourful tufted yarn, which is fun to experiment with. 

For me, working with a railway has different connotations. On the one hand, there’s a natural connection with play, with the model railways and car tracks of childhood, and with the feeling of being able to build your own worlds. On the other hand, I’ve always been fascinated by the collective, by trying to see society as a kind of entity and a common concern, slightly from above or from a distance, as can be the case physically in an exhibition hall. Railways hold so many collective experiences – dreams, frustration and anger – that I’ve become curious about.

Once, when I posted a comic strip on Instagram that I’d drawn on sticky notes while waiting in the national rail operator’s phone queue, feeling frustrated at how difficult it was to book a train ticket between southern and northern Sweden, I was struck by the strength of the response. I started thinking about all the different feelings aroused by travelling and trying to travel by train, and about the nature of our relationship with railways. How this relationship has a common character. 

I believe that there’s a wide range of emotions, from frustration over delayed trains and boredom while waiting for your turn, to a sense of sadness that it’s sometimes easier and cheaper to fly than to go by train. That we’ve found it so hard to take care of what exists between us: the rails, nature, interpersonal connections, and what we all have in common. At the same time, this relationship is characterised by longing and a need to reach out to others. Railways disrupt and interfere with our everyday plans, our working lives and our thoughts about what society could be. There are historical links back to the time when the railway network was first built. In Umeå in the county of Västerbotten, there’s also a special connection thanks to Sara Lidman’s Jernbane novels. And there’s a collective starting point in dreams and disappointments.

Trains seem to strike a different nerve in us compared to other forms of transport. We use expressions such as people or things ‘going off the rails’. And in Swedish, if something goes smoothly we say that it runs ‘like a train’. We don’t say ‘It runs like an Audi on the motorway’ or ‘It runs like a domestic flight’. A railway can also be seen as a desire for communication on a more symbolic level. How we try to reach out to each other with varying degrees of success, and then stand there like stupid, rusty robots when we fail. And perhaps we need someone to lay a soft, friendly, tufted hand over what’s broken.