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During an artist residency at Tomma Rum in Ljusne, Sweden I started a daily practice of going out into the fields and along the sides of roads to pick lupines. The entire landscape was littered with vibrant purple and pink lupines. It just so happened that their blooming cycle lined up perfectly with my four weeks in residence. Each day I would go out, sometimes multiple times a day to pick them. With two large paper bags from IKEA and a pair of scissors, I would set out to fill one bag with purple and the other with pink lupines. The pink ones were more rare and by the end of my stay harder to find. Once full, I would lug them back to the former power station we used as a studio space and stack them by color inside an old turbine.
Being in Sweden in the summer meant endless hours of sunlight. As I grew accustomed to light at all hours of the day, it was no longer important to pay attention to time. I stopped looking at clocks and ignored my phone. I found other ways to measure time, such as in the accumulation of Lupines. Every day the pile in the turbine would swell with the addition of new lupines and shrink under the weight of new flowers and the wilting of time.
I soon learned that Lupines were considered an invasive species in Sweden. Ljusne, a small former industrial town on the eastern country-side of Sweden was populated by a small community of locals and a growing influx of asylum seekers. I was likely the only American there, an invasive species of my own sort, reveling in the beauty of weeds.