RINGBORG started as a painter and the influence of painting, especially the Flemish and Baroque artists, is evident in her work. ‘In all of my pictures, I have worked in a painterly way, with texture and colours in the photographs. Coming from painting, that’s a natural way for me to work, it's only the media that have changed...’
It was the history of 15th-19th century European painting that’s sparked her interest. ‘I grew up looking at these images in my dad’s art books and I was very fascinated by the stories they told. Velásquez is one of them; Lucas Cranach, Holbein, Caravaggio, Goya… I also adore later artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.’
Ringborg works at ‘the borders between fantasy and reality’. She uses child models in fictional settings and narratives and digitally manipulates the images. The children in her photographs seem somehow detached, depersonalised. ‘That’s my intention, I'm not interested in working with portraits. I work with my models, change them until they become something else, become my own… I want them to evolve into symbols or signs rather than individuals.’
‘In all of my pictures, I have worked in a painterly way, with texture and colours in the photographs’
She’s been likened to Loretta Lux, a German photographer who also uses children in her work and styles them. But Ringborg’s dreamlike images are much darker. A boy points a gun at the viewer and another one catches a fish with scissors. Her children are more sinister and cruel, almost scary, forming perhaps a more truthful portrayal of childhood which is fearless and borderless by nature. Something we lose when we grow up? ‘I think the children in my work are vulnerable and fearless in the same time. I don't see a clear difference between the adult and the child though… I believe the childhood is always present in the adult and the integrity, pride and other feelings that are supposed to be reserved for the adult, are very present in the child even if not always respected. I think that's what I'm trying to show in a sense. In the Wonderland series, it’s also the child creating alternative spaces to handle reality. Dream and reality is merged in order to survive but also as an entertainment.’
She stresses out that Wonderland (2003-2006) is far from following or illustrating the famous book by Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The title is actually used ‘as a metaphor for an inner as well as an outer world turned upside down’. ‘Wonderland is about the stigma and wonder of childhood. The child dealing with life, death, dependency and powerlessness, adapting the norms of the adult world or refusing them. The child facing the physical reality and fears by creating a private, magical sphere with the own rules, where the borders between adult, child, dream and reality are dissolved.’ Wonderland is a place where the ‘child itself creates the norms and hierarchies, but not being able to completely shut the actual reality out, the hopes and fears can take any shape.’
When working on the triptych Infantia (2006), Velásquez was on her mind, ‘even if I don't refer directly to his painting Las Meninas, the infanta in that picture has inspired the title’. The Latin word infantia means ‘child that can’t yet speak’ which contrasts with the worldliness of tattoos. ‘The tattoo is a way to manifest your identity or an experience that you have had. Something that’s reserved for the grown-up human being. In this work, I let the child carry the tattoo as a comment to the idea about the uncomplicated child.’
The Limbo Pictures (2007) are about the place in between, reserved for those who are ‘excluded from heaven but neither deserve eternal punishment in hell’ as in Dante’s Inferno. Everything is unclear and judgment impossible to reach. ‘The characters are isolated in their own situations without the existence of a Before and After, they therefore have a total lack of perspective on the own situation.’ Ringborg admits the traces of Caravaggio and ‘maybe a little Goya’ in these dark images.
Being from the younger generation of Swedish artists, she’s taken the full advantage of the globalisation of art and hasn’t even thought about difficulties in reaching her audience. ‘One thing has always led to another, and my webpage seems to have a life by its own.’
‘I don’t think my works are particular to Sweden, I think the world right now is quite global and my inspirations are from all over the world.’
www.lovisaringborg.se
Prague born Michaela is an MA graduate of Goldsmith’s College, London. She was an editor at Momentum publishing (specialist art books) for Flowers East and is currently London bureau chief for Prague Metro; a curator at Divus Publishing; and deputy editor of PHOTOICON.
