Mother of Pearl

In this monograph on Carin Ellberg, we decided to let a conversation between Maria Lind and the artist dictate the structure of the book. Starting with Ellberg’s most recent work at the time, Mother of Pearl, the conversation interweaves memories, reflections, and associations leading from one work to another, jumping back and forth in time, and mapping out the order and logic in the artist’s visual world.

In order for the reader to get drawn into this world, the book starts with a series of images before moving on to Peter Cornell’s foreword: “After a while, some verbs made themselves known, intrinsic movements in Carin Ellberg’s artworks, formulated in her dialect: Flowing, Hanging, Wavering, Growing […].”

In order to amplify Ellberg’s voice, we chose to add a quote from the conversation as a subtitle to Mother of Pearl: …might be lying there, a huge one.

The appendix doubles as a list of illustrations with all the spreads in the book as thumbnails—Mother of Pearl …might be lying there, a tiny one.