Hanna Antonsson
With rich and nourishing surroundings of the swedish landscape, When Hanna found dead birds on the streets upon accidents and such, The feathery beings, did find their way to an extended life through her art works.
Hanna, Your work reminds me of the biblical angels mentioned in Christianity. With feathers and eyes, In your case its with various different materials. Lets start with getting to discuss on how and when you encountered the set direction of your art works the way you do. How The Auto wing series started just as you say with a reference to the biblically accurate angels that has been seen a lot online for a while now. I wanted to make a seraph, the angel with six pairs of wings and loads of eyes. In my version the angel wings come from pigeons and the eyes is shards of glass from a car windshield.
Thinking of the sculpture as kind of angels sparked inspiration for the rest of the Auto wing series that I’ve been working on the last couple of years. The birds are mostly found as roadkills and while collecting them I put two and two together and started using the left over car parts that were sharing the ditches with the birds and made them to new creatures and hybrids together.
How was life growing up? How did you realise that art is what you belong to?
I’m from a dense forest part in south of Sweden and grew up very bored in very beautiful surroundings with a lot of animals and motorised vehicles. I was encouraged by my mother to do all sorts of artsy stuff as a kid, drawing, knitting, clay, pearls. She also took me and my brothers to a lot of museums, especially history and natural history ones. As a teenager I longed for more likeminded people and speed so when it was time for me to choose my studies I chose what I thought would give me the best chance of meeting fun people in the future. When I started my first preparatory school studying photography I knew I was on the right path and since then things have magically worked out.
Please take us through your early years practicing your craft, how did you reach the space you are now, the trial and error phase, or the pivotal moments in your artistic journey so far ?
I went to a preparatory art school after being lost for a year since high school. I was encouraged to apply to the photography program at London College of Communication by a teacher, and got accepted. I then moved to London together with Arvida Byström and lived two years in an old factory with loads of other artists and creatives. After one year at LCC I dropped out due to the insanely expensive study fees and competitive climate at the school which got me completely discouraged.. I had no plans and just partied and worked at this bar until I got kind of depressed. I made a decision to do something about my situation and moved to Norway for a while and worked normal jobs like cleaning old peoples homes and as a sales assistant at Toys’R’Us. I think, sadly enough, I had decided that art wasn’t for me but I never really stopped taking pictures, I just didn’t think of them as art in that way. I then went traveling for a while for the money I’d saved. Once back home in Sweden again a friend encouraged me to apply to the art school in Gothenburg and I gave it a shot. I got accepted and discovered a slower approach to doing art than in London which suited me a lot better. I applied for a grant that gave me the opportunity to do a taxidermy course outside Edinburgh in Scotland with George Jamieson in a beautiful workshop in a shed attached to his Disney like stone castle for a week. It was an insane experience and a bit overwhelming but it made me brave enough to go about it myself back home. I graduated from art school during covid and was unemployed while having a big personal crisis and just spent a lot of time in my studio. It was at this point I bought an Arduino starter kit and at the same time the seraph angel started appearing everywhere on the internet and suddenly it all made sense.
Whats the story of Pigeons, crows and birds alike ? How did you start using them in your work? from the recent and earlier times when you also work through photographic medium. Whats the meaning of birds in general in your art works? I’m curious on this as a repetitive subject.
Since I grew up close to animals I’ve always had a special connection to them and experienced even the city pigeons as, although goofy, as individuals with their own personalities. When I moved to the city I spent a lot of time in natural history museums to somehow “reconnect” with animals I guess. I did a lot of photo projects around these institutions but got more and more frustrated with the glass cabinets that was always hindering me from getting close. That’s when I started thinking about doing taxidermy myself.
The reason for birds being a recurring subject started as a feather fascination. The collector in me has always treasured beautiful feathers, stones and flowers. I’ve also had an interest in mythical beings and beasts with wings, and I have a long list of creatures that I want to make my own versions of. With the Auto wing series it has grown to be more of a way to shine light on the problem of humanity destroying nature. The amount of animals suffering and dying because of humans is deeply troubling to me.
How do you source and gather the elements of your art works, Whats the overall creative and artistic process like? What are the kind of struggles and challenges you go through?
All the birds I use have been found dead, mostly as roadkill but also as cat prey or window collisions. I have a lot of friends that keep an eye out for me and sends me pictures and locations of birds they encounter when moving about the city. That’s why I use such common birds as seagulls, pigeons and magpies in the sculptures. It’s not hard to find scrap car parts, I keep an eye out for both birds and interesting looking scrap while biking around the city. I always carry a couple of plastic bags with me to keep the dead birds in.
I spend a lot of time sketching with my materials on hand in the studio. I’ve never been good with drawing so I like to play around with stuff I have lying around me. I’ve spent a lot of time in second hand and antique shops so I have a good material storage to use from. A lot of time goes into the taxidermy process of course, and I actually have a second studio approved by the Swedish authorities as a legal taxidermy workshop. I recently made a small zine with pictures from the process in Burnout press here: https://burnoutpress.com/
Another time consuming thing is the programming of the different motors and I’ve gotten a lot of help from others with this process. Now I’m trying out some new movements and feel like I know enough to go about it myself at this point.
It sounds stupid but I struggle with creativity, I see myself as more of a crafty person rather than a creative one. I feel like I don’t have as much ideas and passion as I should have to be a real artist. But this is of course just a question of me being unsure of myself from time to time.
What is your relation and intention with the juxtaposition of etherial and industrial topics? What lures you to club such two areas in one? Please explain ?
In my photography I’ve always worked with pairing pictures together and make long choreographed series meant to be read in a specific order. This warps the reading of the objects in the pictures, giving them qualities and feelings of being something “they’re not”, since they’re carrying with them a feeling of the previous picture. I would put soft objects against rough and hard ones, organic matter with rust and metal, wet with dry and so on. This is a way of questioning reality and playing with a “what if” pseudo science. This way of juxtaposing birds that often symbolise life and cars symbolising decay, and playing with objects is at the core of my artistic practice and so it naturally followed along when I moved to doing sculpture.
Your recent most art work - Auto wings ( Taxidermy pigeon wings, tail light from Volvo,
windshields, metal stands, servos, arduinos ) at Jag föreställer mig ett hem, Göteborg Konsthall, Gothenburg. Tell us about it. How did it come together. What the influence and thought behind it. Whats the story ?
With Auto wing VIII I had decided to go up in scale and wanted to do my take on a natural history /victorian bird cabinet but with car windshields instead of cabinet glass for the pigeon wings. As we know, taxidermy history is filled with horrible stories of colonialism and unnecessary killings for fashion. This version is maybe not very realistic but somewhat more truthful than the dioramas in some natural history museums.
What are your intentions with all your work? What are you trying achieve from such a peculiar direction of subject and what your expect your viewers to feel or understand ?
At best I think my work is seen as a comment on our environmental issues, our horrible impact on wildlife and nature. I would be naive to think that’s the way all spectators view my work but I would love it if my art would make the birds and animals we have in our vicinity more visible when they are alive and get the respect they deserve as creatures on the citys ecosystem. Using animals in art evokes strong emotions in viewers, some people are fascinated and curious, others get disgusted and uncomfortable. I see it as taking care of an animal that would otherwise rot in the streets if I didn’t pick it up. Seen as trash and a dirty burden to city life when alive they’re not worth a lot to people. When I put them in my work these animals get seen but very differently from when they were alive.
Whats going on right now in your studio? Give us a little tour of your artistic space? How does it look or feel? Any on going projects youd like talk about ?
Right now I’m trying out new moving patterns for the wings, instead of waving I want them to rotate so I’m building some arms for the wings to rest on when attached to the motor. This last month I’ve picked out two crows from the fridge and gone through the whole taxidermy process on them so that they can be used for this next sculpture. On the walls I’m trying out new ways of showing my photos, playing with frames in materials that mimic the objects in the pictures. I’m also testing out some new motors as well to see if they can take being on for long exhibition periods. I’ve had one of them on for a whole week now, I want to see how long its lifespan is.
Last but not least, What are you currently reading or watching? Shout out to someone or
something you’d like our readers to check out?
Thanks for the questions! I have three tips:
I’m doing a residency and duo exhibition in Tokyo in the beginning of 2024 together with Taiki Yokote (@ykttik) at CON_ gallery. His work blows my mind and I’m so insanely grateful that I’m going to work with him.
I also work closely with my partner Runa Rosgaard (@liqvid_flvid) who is an amazing artist and musician. They are like a live cartoon with a head filled with so much weird references that they manage to connect in the most absurd and clever ways, both in art installations and music.
My good friend Ljung (@ljungtunes) is dropping a new album Bleed and bloom this week, I’m proud to have shot the album cover for an incredible electronic artist.
courtesy of HANNA ANTONSSON
interview by JAGRATI MAHAVER
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