ATTI JOHANSSON

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The painting “Skogsbruksteknologi” (“Forest technology”) by Atti Johansson is from the 1970’s and enhances one of our time’s most important environmental questions. She lived in Norrland and experienced herself how financial profits in modern forestry threatened nature and thereby the existence of mankind. Enormous forested areas were clear-felled, not least in the north of Sweden, and the poisons used in forestry quickly killed all blueberries and lingon.

The picture is constructed like a collage of several picture parts that together relate a message. Nearly all of the picture consists of a machine engine abandoned in the forest together with an oil sump. It reflects reality; when clear-felling was finished nobody cleaned up the mess. In order for us to understand the engine she has included a black and white sketch of a forest clearing machine with huge wheels and claw clutch gripping a load of timber. These enormous machines also caused great damage to nature; sores difficult to heal.

But the artist shows us that there is hope – if we only think before we act – through showing the fresh green branches sprouting new buds we can see surrounding the motif. They almost seem to be on the way to devouring the engine and oil sump. Furthest up on the left she has painted a patch of clear blue sky.

Atti Johansson was born in Kiruna in 1917 and lived in Norrland until she passed away in 2003. All her art is about people and people’s life environment, and her pictures became an important input in the environmental debate. She showed that it is possible to control the ruthless exploitation and poison-spraying of forests, and that one can, if one wants to, create forestry adjusted to forest’s, mankind’s and ecological needs.

The painting was part of an exhibition entitled “Ska skogens källa sina?” (“Will the forest’s well run dry?”) exhibited in several places in 1978, one of which was here at the museum. Eight years later the Chernobyl atomic power station disaster happened, and the north of Sweden, where Atti Johansson lived, suffered greatly from radioactive fallout. This became the theme for new pictures, but that is another story.