Michaela Frycklund explores how forgotten buildings and materials can be given new life by stewarding and reworking one of our landscape’s most characteristic sculptural monuments: the decaying barn.

Twenty square meters hold a barn, or what could be salvaged of it. The rock chamber is ten meters long, and I can’t step back to see what it is I’m doing. Instead, I take photographs with a flash and begin to unscrew. This barn has to come down too—and then be raised again.

Again and again, I get small infected wounds on my hands from porous wooden splinters, which I quickly have to scrape out with a knife before it goes too far. I always forget my work gloves, and it’s much easier to work with bare hands.

“Wear yourself out, by all means,” he said, giving the directions. It’s heavy work, and I truly have worn myself out—but the incubation period for hantavirus is two weeks, my grandmother said.

Michaela Frycklund

Michaela Frycklund (b. 1995, Härnösand) lives and works in Umeå and is educated at the Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University. She works on a large scale in wood and operates in the borderland between construction and art, where one readily flows into the other. Her works are often placed outdoors and are shaped over time by weather, nature, and people. Frycklund is interested in how art can interact with its surroundings and raise questions about who is given space in the public realm. By making use of forgotten or leftover materials, she investigates which stories are preserved—and which risk disappearing.