| art.description.project | In March 2014, I read an article in Strömstads Tidning, a local Swedish newspaper about a series of “mysterious yellow blobs” that washed ashore on the beaches of the Skagerrak, from Strömstad, Sweden, to Fredrikstad, Norway. The article described a man named Håkan Bolin, who was walking his dog on a beach outside Strömstad when the dog discovered one of the yellow blobs. Fearing it was poisonous he pulled the dog back, and immediately contacted the authorities. The authorities proceeded to collect the blobs and conduct tests on them. The tests revealed that the blobs were made of vegetable oil and traces of xylene. But what they were or from where they came, remained a mystery.
In the following weeks I compiled all the news articles in the Swedish and Norwegian press which mentioned the blobs, and began removing all the unnecessary information from the clippings. In the end all that was left were the words, “gula” and “klumpar” in Swedish, and “gule” and “klumpene” in Norwegian, meaning yellow and blobs.
In order to try to track the origin of the blobs, I then contacted the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, as well as Kosterhavets National Park, to research the currents of the Skagerrak. As it turned out, a vast amount of refuse from the Atlantic is siphoned into the narrow pocket of the Skagerrak. Thus pinpointing their origin proved impossible.
Further, I felt that while it was informative knowing Håkan Bolin’s side of the story, the man in the original article, I wanted to know what the dog who had actually discovered the blobs thought of all this. I wrote to Håkan, asking him if I could interview the dog, Labolina. He wrote back saying, that while he was skeptical, Labolina wanted to do it and it was she who should decide. So I traveled up and interviewed Labolina on the beach where she had found the blobs.
While with them, Håkan gave me a bag of the yellow blobs which he had pilfered before the authorities arrived. I took the blobs home, and for the first week just kept them in my fridge. After some thought, I began to do studies of the blobs in different techniques, trying to better understand them. I also began making cyanotypes with them, consisting of the blobs’ self-determined silhouettes when placed on coated paper and exposed to the sun. I called the cyanotypes “Klumpen i sig,” meaning the blob-in- itself, referencing Kant’s discussion of the thing-in- itself. This in turn became the title for the project. | sv |
