Anneli Furmark / You Are the Centre of the Earth 

Anneli Furmark’s works, comics as well as painting, often explore the ways people relate to one another, to the landscape, and to place. Her narratives frequently unfold in northern settings, with particular attention to houses and built environments.

Bildmuseet presents drawings, comics, paintings and sketchbooks from the past fifteen years. Also on view is a film created especially for the exhibition, in which actors give voice to short stories from Furmark’s graphic novels.

Comics, Drawings, Paintings, 2010–2026; Anneli Furmark

How come the need arises to tell stories about what one sees and experiences through images, or in text, or both? Many people seem to get along just fine without it. Others have to. Well, have to is perhaps the wrong expression – they want to. The desire outweighs the difficulties. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.

Comics were there from the beginning. As a child, I read everything I could find along the lines of comics. I never really stopped reading them. When I grew up in the 1980s, the magazine Galago (and later also the publishing house) appeared, which became hugely significant for me, and for many other Swedish comic creators – perhaps most of them. Through Galago, I also discovered the world of international graphic novels for adults, and I’ve never really left it. I won’t go into every single artist and writer, because it would take up all the space here. I never understood why comics should be considered inferior to books consisting only of text, which was a view that was very common when I was young.

That notion lingered for a long time, though it is starting to fade now. If you want to draw your own comics, you need nothing more than paper and pens, and yet you have an entire world. And you get to decide everything! Compare that to making a film, for example, which is infinitely more complicated.  When I realised I could draw comics, the text finally freed up. My previous attempts at writing (apart from letters and diaries) had always ended up in a drawer or hidden away in some folder on the computer that I never opened. When I let the characters in the comics say things, the dialogue suddenly moved out of my own tangled inner self and I stopped being embarrassed by what they said. I was focused on the time-consuming but fun work of portraying the environments and the characters visually, and then they had to say something too, so I just had to make that up. That is still how I work. 

As I mentioned, I think an artist wants to move out of their own tangled inner self, not necessarily process it over and over again. You start from yourself, but it is still what you see that matters. How the light falls. How someone looks sad on a bus, or happy. A solitary house, a spring sky, trees with branches spreading against that same sky. The gleam in puddles. People, and perhaps something going on in their tangled inner selves. The landscapes that appear in my pictures are often the ones I feel at home in. Those places are also often in the far north. In certain places, I can feel more at home than at home. 

When I was a child in Norrbotten in the 1960s and 70s, it was called drawing (”rita”). I was good at drawing. Then I started art school, and it was called illustrating / drawing (”teckna”). Other students at the art schools were at least as good at drawing as I was, some much better. It was a crisis. That little queue of friends in primary school who wanted commissioned drawings made by me was gone. Somehow, my existence was shaken. Why did I keep going? Why should anyone keep at it, what was the point? I started wondering what art actually was.  

As a child, I never thought about that. I liked looking at paintings and sculptures, and I didn’t make a distinction between whether it was a painting by a famous artist or a mass-produced Christmas wall hanging. All sorts of things could be inspiring: how Ivar Arosenius drew princesses, how Ingrid Vang Nyman drew liquorice sweets in a sugar bowl in the Pippi Longstocking book, how a (sadly unknown) artist painted moonlight over white snow on a paper Christmas wall hanging on the wall at my grandmother’s. I learnt much later that some art was considered high and other art low. I went down quite a few blind alleys while I was studying art. I didn’t start making comics in earnest until I finished art college. Comics weren’t art back then. Now they are art, sometimes. Unclear why. Drawing was always there, sometimes almost on the sly. I have always returned to drawing. 

The landscape  

I find something awkward about saying that I paint landscapes. It sort of reduces the surroundings to a motif, something to look at, a view through a picture window. Like saying NATURE and forgetting that we are NATURE. It’s probably romanticism haunting us here, the idea that the landscape is an extension of one’s state of mind. Rather, it is the other way around: certain landscapes create a state of mind within you, something you are frightened by or attracted to. Or something that feels more like home than home itself.  

I would much rather the landscape be something I am in, something I have to walk into and understand. I really like older landscape painters like Carl Fredrik Hill, Vera Frisén, and Nikolaj Astrup. They have been there, in the landscape, and forgotten themselves, letting the landscape move into them. Perhaps it is a way of conquering without colonising. As a landscape painter, you don’t want to own it, or extract anything from it except the image itself. And the place, the mountains, for instance, doesn’t care about you at all. You are not the centre of the earth. Unless you are one of those people who blast rock or build roads or mines, well, you know what I mean.  

The landscape is most prominent in those of my books that take place in Iceland and Northern Norway – the graphic novels Jordens medelpunkt, En sol bland döda klot, and Närmare kommer vi inte. In Jordens medelpunkt from 2012, the protagonist Axel’s mother says: ”Nature there (in the mountains) is so unaffected, somehow. I don’t mean untouched, but unaffected.” In the same book, the mother’s boyfriend Toralf says irritably that Axel thinks the world revolves around him. But doesn’t everyone think that? That isn’t the same thing as being self-centred, or not caring about what happens to other living creatures or the planet. But it is always you looking out at the world; it revolves around you. Everyone is the centre of the earth.  

Houses 

Many of the images of houses in the exhibition come from my immediate surroundings. Sometimes the light falls in a way I haven’t seen before, and a house I hadn’t really paid attention to becomes visible and something I want to capture in an image, often using crayons. The seasons play a huge role. In November, for example, many colours fade while others suddenly flare up with intensity. Once, a few years ago, during the pandemic, I decided to draw / paint (I never quite know what to call it when working with crayons) everything around me for a whole year. Summer was the hardest, and the absolute hardest part was early June. The greenery took over, but I think I learned something from that experiment: that there is always something off to the side to fix your gaze on, and to find a crayon that works alongside all that green. Perhaps that is often what I am after in my work as a whole: shifting the gaze just a little, seeing what I hadn’t seen, looking at the unassuming in order to discover something unexpected. 

It can be like that with the characters in my books, too. They aren’t exactly heroes. They often end up in situations where they have to act, even though they might prefer not to. I make them do things they don’t really dare to do, just to see what happens. It’s no coincidence that several of them are queer. A quote attributed to Tove Jansson, who happens to be one of my great idols, goes like this: ”If you’re not afraid, how can you be truly brave?”. Perhaps I just feel that strong and brave people aren’t all that fun to write about. More things happen around the cowards, in my world. Or as Elise says in the book Gå med mig till hörnet: ”What do you do if you aren’t strong, then? What do you do if you’re weak and an idiot?” 

The Film 

I have worked with animator Frida Hammar and musician Elmer Hallsby on two previous exhibitions Medan det pågår [While It Is Happening] at Köttinspektionen in Uppsala in 2019, and En dag i morgon [A Day Tomorrow] at Gallery Verkligheten in Umeå in 2021, where Frida created films based on my images and Elmer made the music. Now we are collaborating again on a slideshow featuring a few episodes from the comics. This time, two artists I have long wanted to work with are joining us: the actors Sven Björklund and Petra Brylander, who bring the characters Peter, Järven, Rune, Boman, Siv, Gerd, Dagmar, and Elise, among others, to life and give them voices. 

The Sketchbooks 

My sketchbooks are quite thin A5-format notebooks that are easy to carry around. I always have one on the go, and there is quite a large collection of them now. Sometimes a notebook lasts for several months; sometimes I fill one in a couple of weeks, especially if I’m travelling. When I was younger, I wrote page after page in diaries. I don’t write in the sketchbooks now, other than very brief notes. Drawing has become my diary, and I often return to the sketchbooks. A drawing recalls the entire situation in a way that the photos on my phone cannot. Sometimes I am looking for a specific character or a place to use for a comic or a painting, but usually the sketchbook has no other function than to accompany me and help me see things. For me, drawing is a way to linger in a place, to remember, and to hold onto the moment. And sometimes, on fortunate occasions, to understand something.