COURTESY THE ARTIST
YLVA WESTERLUND (SE)
The New Hird (2017)
Sulfate 3000 (2016)
Ylva Westerlund’s interest in comics is based mainly on specific issues of the American series Giant. Industrial structures and their relationship to Nature/ the other are recurrent thoughts in her work. Spending her childhood in the Husum mill community on the northern coast of Sweden and the current workspace on Järvafältet in Stockholm forms the basis for stories about historical heritage and the future. Her practice is often influenced by her interest in social studies, ecofeminism, and monsters. The new graphical short stories The New Hird veers between the perspective of the past, the present, and the future, and forms a mythological level where theoretical models come to a head. The work shows a place where local and global processes interact, creating a kind of reborn Big Bang. The gas clouds have rolled in and a big reaction has started. In this new terrain, some characters wander around, communicate and interact with what was released in the explosion…
