DRIFT begins in the Arctic Ocean, on board the icebreaker Oden, embarking on both an inner and outer expedition. Over six weeks, Sara-Vide Ericson works in a container on deck painting eighty new works, while the ship is breaking through two-metre-thick ice surrounded by a landscape that’s constantly shifting.

In 2025, Sara-Vide joins the expedition Canada-Sweden Arctic Ocean in which the icebreaker Oden paves the way through the frozen landscape. The process is both transformative and strenuous, including helicopter excursions onto the ice to gather material for the works emerging on board as well as for the continued work in the artist’s home studio in Hälsingland.

DRIFT spans around eighty new works, a story about the human drive meeting the unyielding forces of nature, but also a confrontation with inner drives, fears and limitations.

-Sara-Vide Ericson approaches other forces in nature. I’m fascinated by and recognize the urge that compels her when she paints. In some ways, she doesn’t differentiate between the predator’s hunger, the horse’s need for movement or her own urge to make art. The need to paint is simultaneously an insight and an urge, says Joanna Sandell Wright, Artistic Director of Liljevalchs.

For this exhibition, Sara-Vide Ericson has worked in an expanded field of painting, ranging from monumental canvases and installations to materials from the Arctic expedition. At a depth of 4,000 metres beneath the Arctic Ocean, rare ground sediments were collected through deep sea drilling – a research material where organic and geologic content is preserved in oxygen-deficient environments for millennia. In Ericson’s work, these unique sediments integrate into the works: they are dried, ground and transformed into pigment. Simultaneously, they approach each other through the body – via touch, scent and taste – in an exploration where measurable data meet sensuous experiences. Here, the precisely measurable is faced with the deeply subjective. All the works are new and are exhibited for the very first time.

The expedition is a tangible experience of displacement and resistance, but also an image of the conditions of art-making. When the body and the immense presence of the ice meet, themes that long have characterized Ericson’s practice are deepened: presence, transformation, and the limit between dissolution and unity.

During the last few years, Sara-Vide Ericson has established herself as one of her generation’s most significant artists, exhibiting both in Sweden and internationally. In her figurative painting, personal experiences, mythical motifs and the sovereignty of nature are interwoven in intense and physical imagery. The practice emanates from a physical way of working, where presence, vulnerability and transformation are recurring themes. In DRIFT, these explorations are deepened through an encounter with a landscape that both carries and dissolves the human being.

Photo: Christian Larsson