I was brought up on a bow-shaped street in a suburb of Stockholm. Every morning, while eating breakfast before school, I looked down from my window at the workers walking toward the two big factories that the whole community was built up around. Between those factories was the soccer field, where I made my carrier as the goalkeeper of the local soccer team for boys born 1960.

In the summer, everybody went “home”, which meant somewhere else. The buildings were numb and the streets left empty, home was somewhere else. We all came from other places and were, adults as well as children, all settlers, immigrants, part of a social experiment called the Swedish Model and part of a new society.

My paintings originate from the compact camera of the
1960s. The Instamatic was probably the first democratic camera. That camera gave the suburban mothers, the women of the 1960s, the ability to take pictures of there own lives. These family photographs became pictures of the women and mothers of the 1960s. (Who ever saw a man run around with such a camera!)?

My painting process has become a way of recalling the rooms where I grew up and why I became the person I am – of who saw me and what I saw. I found it very irritating to remember so little, yet spend so much time thinking about my childhood. And why was it more important for me as the goalkeeper to look fabulous when throwing myself at the ball, than that the ball rolled into the net behind me.

The paintings have become a way of remembering and a way to save some of the memories from my childhood along that bow-shaped street in the suburb.