Maria Adolfsson

The light moves. Shadows glide across the room; it glitters, flickering occasionally as the robot changes direction. The tree stands watch. It bears the marks of hands, pressure, weather, marked by time. Nothing romantic, just wear and tear and time. I like seeing them together—the old, worn-out against the glittering and seductive. It creates a balance within me.
There is something beautiful in that friction between what shines and what bears. I think that’s what it’s about. The balance. And carrying something fragile without knowing why. Sometimes I think the robot is me. That the movement is like me. Tentative and humble.

Shine on me and I’ll sparkle.

The title comes from a line of text I wrote when I was a teenager.
It has become a way for me to think about how attention works.
How something can become visible when light falls on it
and how it can just as quickly disappear again.
It’s also about class and experiences and how they influence how we move through the world. Inherited behaviours and patterns.

Like a state between everyday life and poetry.
Something that is almost beautiful but also sad.
The work is not about technique but about bodily memory.
About work that continues.
About value.
And about how class manifests itself in everyday life, in money, and in opportunities.
It is in the process that I feel most at home and alive. When I get to sit with my pieces. Move them around a bit. Try them against each other. Make sure every piece finds its place. That something suddenly starts to fit together and a world slowly emerges.
I like working that way. With fragments. With things that at first don’t seem to belong together but eventually come together, like a strange mix of precision and play, where every little piece must find its place for the whole to come to life.